Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Railway Workers, Scotland

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Minister of Labour how many railway workers in the north and north-east of Scotland have been dismissed, suspended, or placed on short time owing to the closing-down of branch railway lines in those areas.

The Minister of Labour (Mr. Edward Heath): None, Sir.

Mr. Hughes: Does the Minister realise that the closing down of these lines cuts across the policy, or the alleged policy, of the Secretary of State for Scotland of encouraging industry in the north and north-east of Scotland? Will the right hon. Gentleman consult the Secretary of State for Scotland and the President of the Board of Trade with a view to evolving a policy which is not contradictory as between certain Ministers?

Mr. Heath: I have stated the position as far as past closures are concerned. Future proposals are, I understand, still under discussion.

Hours of Work

Mr. Ellis Smith: asked the Minister of Labour to what extent the conclusion on page 37 of the International Labour Conference Report VII (1), prepared for the 44th session in 1960, is in conformity with the policy of Her Majesty's Government; and if he will have legislation prepared so that at the conference he will be in a position to indicate that Her Majesty's Government will at once implement a convention to guarantee a 40-hour working week.

Mr. Heath: I presume that the hon. Member is referring to the last paragraph on page 37 of the Report. The

Government have followed the procedure there outlined. The Answer to the second part of the question is "No, Sir."

Mr. Ellis Smith: Does not the Minister think it would be in the best interest of Britain if international standards could be agreed to at such a conference? Would not this tend to eliminate unfair foreign competition? If the Minister agrees with that reasoning, should not concrete action be taken on these lines at this conference?

Mr. Heath: The hon. Gentleman has a Question later on the Notice Paper about the general replies we have given to this questionnaire in which we have explained our position.

Mr. Ellis Smith: asked the Minister of Labour if he will make a statement on the reply made to the questionnaire sent out in accordance with Article 39 of the Standing Orders of the International Labour Conference, which deals with the reduction of hours of work.

Mr. Heath: I am sending the hon. Member a copy of the Government's reply and I will also arrange for one to be put in the Library.

Mr. Ellis Smith: asked the Minister of Labour if he has studied the International Labour Organisation Report VII (1), prepared for the 44th session in 1960, with particular reference to Table I, Table III, Table IV, and Table V; what examination has been made of the International Labour Organisation Report VII; and what action it is intended to take to reduce the working week of industrial workers and miners in this country and increase their annual holiday period with improved payments.

Mr. Heath: I have studied this Report with interest, and it has been carefully examined in my Department in consultation with other Departments concerned. As the reduction of hours of work is for the two sides of a particular industry to discuss and decide, the Government do not contemplate action of the kind suggested.

Mr. Ellis Smith: In view of the growing interest in the need for a reduction in hours of work throughout the world, and particularly in our own country, has not the time arrived when


the Minister and also the Ministry should take greater interest in this matter in order to give a lead to industry?

Mr. Heath: Naturally we have a great deal of interest in this matter, but I should have thought it was becoming quite evident at the moment that the two sides of industry are discussing this matter very seriously, and are, of course, in some prominent cases, reaching agreement on it.

Gower, Pontardawe and Llwchwr

Mr. I. Davies: asked the Minister of Labour if he will give the percentage figures of unemployed for the Gower rural, Pontardawe rural and Llwchwr urban districts, respectively.

Mr. Heath: Figures are not available for local government districts, but I am sending the hon. Member such information as we have.

Mr. Davies: Whilst thanking the Minister for that reply, may I ask him whether he appreciates that the percentage of pockets of unemployment in some of these districts is considerably higher than the national average? May I impress upon the right hon. Gentleman that he should try to encourage the Minister of State responsible for the Development Areas to induce new industries to go into these areas in order to secure these communities?

Mr. Heath: We will do our best.

International Labour Conferences (Delegations)

Mr. Pavitt: asked the Minister of Labour if he will include a medical or health expert in future lists of advisers in United Kingdom delegations to International Labour Conferences.

Mr. Heath: The composition of the Government delegation to International Labour Conferences and the inclusion, where appropriate, of a medical or health expert must always be a matter for decision on each occasion in the light of the particular circumstances.

Mr. Pavitt: Is the Minister aware of the attention which the International Labour Organisation has been giving to

occupational health services in the last few years? Is the right hon. Gentleman also aware that in this country there is specialised knowledge in the health field which would be useful at these conferences and that doctors in this country are becoming very resentful about being sidetracked on this issue in the past few months?

Mr. Heath: Representations have been received on this matter. They have in no way been sidetracked, because we have undertaken to give consideration to the suggestion, but there is a limit to the size of the delegations and to the number of advisers who can be taken with them.

Mr. Prentice: Will the Minister bear in mind that, as well as passing a recommendation this year on occupational health services, the International Labour Conference asked its governing body to put the matter back on the agenda as early as possible with a view to a convention on this subject? Will he consider appointing a medical adviser on that occasion, because this is something which may affect legislation in this country?

Mr. Heath: Yes. We have undertaken to consider that point. We also have the advantage of our own medical advisers in the Department on these occasions.

Clay Miners, Stirlingshire (Dispute)

Mr. J. Hill: asked the Minister of Labour if his attention has been drawn to the fact that a strike of clay miners in Stirlingshire has continued for more than seven weeks; and whether he will use his good offices to bring this dispute to an end.

Mr. Heath: Yes Sir. My officers have been kept fully informed of the circumstances and they offered to assist the parties shortly after the strike commenced. The offer was not accepted, but last week the union wrote to me suggesting that the dispute should now be settled by arbitration. My officers are now in touch with the parties about this.

Mr. Hill: Is the Minister aware that the cause of this strike is the refusal of the owners to recognise negotiated trade union agreements and that they have so far refused to go to arbitration? This is a


"wildcat" strike, not on behalf of the employees, but on behalf of the employers.

Mr. Heath: It is not for me to offer views and opinions on a matter which at the moment is in dispute. The main thing is that my officers are in consultation with both sides to find a solution to the problem.

Central Ayrshire

Mr. Manuel: asked the Minister of Labour the total number of unemployed registered at the employment exchanges in the constituency of Central Ayrshire at the last convenient date, and the comparable figure for the same time last year.

Mr. Heath: One thousand four hundred and eighty three at 12th October, 1959, compared with 1,714 at 13th October, 1958.

Mr. Manuel: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that those figures show that there were far too many unemployed in this area on both occasions? Will he be good enough to draw the attention of the President of the Board of Trade to the fact that there are a number of empty factories within the constituency and also two industrial estates, one at Irvine and one at Kilwinning, so that excellent facilities can be offered to industrialists who may want to come into an area where the labour is exceptionally good?

Mr. Heath: Yes. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is pleased that there should have been a reduction of over 300 in the last year. My right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade is aware of the situation and will do everything he can to encourage employers to go into the area.

Machine-Tool Company, Coventry (Dismissed Workers)

Mr. Edelman: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware that a Coventry machine-tool company, particulars of which have been given to him, which opened officially in premises costing £125,000 twelve months ago with a labour force of 250, has now dismissed all its employees; and what action he is taking to preserve the special skills of the men so dismissed from the machine-tool industry.

Mr. Heath: I am aware that the firm in question discharged its remaining forty employees at the end of last week. Of the fifteen who have registered for other employment, one has already been placed, three are being considered by other employers and my local officers hope to be able to suggest suitable vacancies to the remainder who are either semi-skilled or unskilled.

Mr. Edelman: While I recognise the efforts made by the right hon. Gentleman and his Department, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he would agree that this is yet another symptom of the decline of this vitally important industry? As in the last ten years the labour force of the industry has declined by about 20 per cent., is it not appropriate that the Government should now inquire into the circumstances in which certain firms are acting as agents for the importation of machine tools from abroad, to the detriment of our own workers?

Mr. Heath: That is a much wider question and is a matter for my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade.

Mr. Snow: Will the right hon. Gentleman consult his staff and examine the Report by the Committee of Public Accounts for 1949, when this industry was investigated? Many of the difficulties now being experienced were envisaged in the Report of that Select Committee.

Mr. Heath: That, again, is a much wider question not concerned with the redundancy in this firm.

Mr. Edelman: On a point of order. In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the overall reply, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this matter on the Adjournment.

Anthrax (Committee's Recommendations)

Mr. Janner: asked the Minister of Labour what steps he proposes to take to implement the recommendations of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Anthrax; and to what extent this will involve legislation.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Peter Thomas): This Report, which was published on 11th November, is comprehensive and


valuable and my right hon. Friend and I would like to take the opportunity of thanking the Chairman and members of the Committee of Inquiry for their work. The recommendations are now being studied. Several require changes in the law, the nature of which is indicated in the summary of recommendations at the end of the Report.

Mr. Janner: How long is it likely to be before the hon. Gentleman will have considered the Report fully? In view of the serious nature of the disease, will he ensure that legislation on the recommendations is introduced as speedily as possible?

Mr. Thomas: The Report came out only on 11th November. It contains twenty-eight recommendations and more than half of them recommend changes in the law. As the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, it is important that there should be consultation with other Government Departments and with all the outside interests concerned, but I ca n assure him that the consultations will be undertaken as speedily as possible.

Mr. Prentice: While appreciating what the hon. Gentleman has said about the complexity of the problem, may I ask whether early action can be taken on the recommendations in paragraph 242 and the following paragraphs about arrangements being made for better washing facilities on the docks and so on? That would be relatively simple. Will he see if he can take early action on those matters while the more complicated subjects are being considered?

Mr. Thomas: I will certainly look into that matter. I am sorry that I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a firm reply at the moment.

Discharged Workers (Period of Notice)

Mr. Biggs-Davison: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will make a statement, and publish any available statistics, regarding the period of notice given by employers, including nationalised corporations, before discharging workers of various categories who become redundant, or are found unsuitable.

Mr. Heath: I regret that comprehensive information is not available.

Redundant Workers

Mr. Swingler: asked the Minister of Labour what arrangements he has with other Departments to ensure that his local officers receive the earliest possible notice of forthcoming redundancies, and are granted special facilities for placing those involved in alternative employment.

Mr. Heath: The local managements of Government industrial establishments inform my local officers of the numbers and qualifications of workers selected for discharge as soon as these are known and at the same time as the workpeople's representatives are informed. My local officers then attend the establishments to register those concerned for other employment, except in cases where the workers concerned come from a distance and prefer to register for local work at an employment exchange nearer their home.
My officers also receive early information from Departments about other forthcoming redundancies of which they have knowledge.

Mr. Swingler: Will the Minister check whether that procedure is working satisfactorily? Is he aware that it seems to work in the case of large-scale redundancy, particularly in the case of the great Royal Ordnance factories, but that in the case of smaller establishments, especially where they are run by the Service Departments, there does not seem to be satisfactory co-ordination with the local employment exchanges?

Mr. Heath: I will certainly look at the way the machinery is working. If the hon. Gentleman will let me have details of specific instances, I will gladly look into them.

Shipbuilding

Dame Irene Ward: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware of the difficulty being experienced by shipbuilders in obtaining new orders to replace contracts now being completed; and whether he will discuss with the Civil Lord of the Admiralty the possibility of accelerating the naval shipbuilding programme.

Mr. Heath: I am aware of the difficulties and I am keeping in touch with my hon. Friend the Civil Lord and my other colleagues on the subject.

Dame Irene Ward: While thanking my right hon. Friend for that encouraging reply, may I ask him to bear in mind, first, that very rightly the Government are doing something about redundancy in the mines and finding money for the enormous coal stocks? Secondly, will he bear in mind the amount of money being spent in Scotland and Wales? Will he remember that the shipyard industry on the North-East Coast needs some help as well?

Mr. Heath: Yes. I quite understand that position and I hope to go to the North-East Coast for the last two days of next week to see the position for myself.

Oral Answers to Questions — NATIONAL SERVICE

Call-up

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will exempt from call-up for National Service married men with dependent children.

Mr. Heath: There is no power under the National Service Acts to exempt any man from National Service; but men can apply to have their call-up postponed on the ground that exceptional hardship would be caused, and my officers have special instructions to consider with the fullest sympathy applications from married men with families where there are difficult home circumstances.

Mr. Lipton: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that all this still leaves the position most uncertain? Is he also aware that there are still about 470,000 men liable for call-up, many of whom will never in fact be called up? When does he intend to make up his mind to start tapering it off and putting many thousands of these men out of suspense?

Mr. Heath: It would not be practical to find a device for excluding all married men with dependent children, because there is no such power under the Act. The machinery for dealing with the problem is long established and is working well. On 12th May my predecessor sent a further instruction to those concerned asking that this problem should be dealt with very sympathetically.

Mr. Ness Edwards: But cannot the Minister bring some termination to this

indefinite postponement, which leaves a lot of apprehension in the minds of the chaps who get it? They do not know whether or not it is indefinite. As it is apparently meant to be indefinite, why not make it quite plain?

Mr. Heath: I think that the right hon. Gentleman has misunderstood the position. When indefinite deferment is granted, it is specifically stated and, as the right hon. Gentleman probably knows, is largely limited to particular industries. Where postponement is granted, it is for a fixed period, and at the end of that period, whether the circumstances remain the same or have in any way changed, it is again open to the man to apply for a further period of postponement.

Mr. Chetwynd: Can the Minister of Labour say whether he really wants these people at this time? With Regular recruiting going as it is and our commitments falling, would not it be better to say that he will end the call-up earlier or free these men from liability?

Mr. Heath: When the decision was made, and announced in the White Paper, that those born after the third quarter of 1939 would not be called up, it was recognised that a certain number of those who were deferred would be available for call-up in the period before call-up ended. It was roughly worked out that those numbers would give the Forces what they required. The number that the Forces require is under consideration for this remaining period, and we shall be able to see whether there are any men who will not be required, but it is very difficult to deal in advance with any specific categories.

Oral Answers to Questions — ROYAL NAVY

H.M.S. "Dreadnought"

Mr. Wall: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty when it is expected that H.M.S. "Dreadnought" will be launched; and when she will be commissioned.

The Civil Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing): It is not the practice to disclose the dates of launching or commissioning of Her Majesty's ships before they have been firmly settled.

Mr. Wall: Will my hon. Friend the Civil Lord bear in mind the desirability of giving adequate notice of this important event?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: As this will be the first British ship of this revolutionary type, and many very great engineering problems are involved, it would be unwise to forecast at this stage, but my noble Friend and myself will certainly try to give advance warning of this important date.

Mr. Wall: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty when a sister ship to H.M.S. "Dreadnought" will be laid down; and when it is proposed to start the construction of a missile-carrying submarine.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: In an effort to give the House and the country a greater amount of information, we have recently announced when the keels of some new surface ships have been laid down. I think it would he most unwise to go any further in announcing future plans. However, I can say that work is proceeding at Dounreay on nuclear submarine prototype machinery.

Mr. Wall: As my hon. Friend has already pointed out the importance of this new type of vessel, would not he agree that, in order to gain adequate operational experience, a sister ship should be laid down as soon as possible? Would not he also agree that the misslecarrying submarine may be the best method in future of delivering the deterrent?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I would not like to answer off the cuff the second part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question, which is a matter of very great strategic consequence—and economic consequence as well. But I would certainly agree with the first part of his supplementary question, and we are giving the matter most careful consideration.

Nuclear-propelled Vessels

Mr. Wall: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty whether he will make a statement about the provision of British n clear-propulsion units for Her Majesty's ships.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: I have already referred to the nuclear submarine proto-

type machinery that is being constructed at Dounreay. The possible applications of nuclear propulsion to surface warships are being studied at the present time.

Mr. Wall: Can my hon. Friend say whether the second nuclear submarine, when laid down, will have a British nuclear-propulsion unit? Will he also bear in mind that, as the prototype nuclear-propelled surface ship is likely to be highly uneconomic either to build or operate, it might well be advisable to have it under the White Ensign?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: The first part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question is rather hypothetical: if it is laid down, will it have British machinery? I do not think that I can add very much to what I said about our Dounreay prototype, except that it is of British construction, although it uses a pressurised water system that is similar to the American type of propulsion unit. The second part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question is a matter for more mature and careful consideration, and will concern my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport.

Mr. Steele: Can the Civil Lord tell the House what has happened to the Committee, of which the Civil Lord was chairman, that was set up to look into this question of nuclear propulsion for ships? Is that Committee still under the Admiralty, or has it disappeared into some other Ministry?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: That Committee would become the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport, but I imagine that we shall continue to have a very close interest in it.

Mr. Steele: But is the Committee still under the Admiralty, or what is happening to it at present?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: No, it is under the Minister of Transport.

Mr. Peyton: In view of the real importance of this matter, is my hon. Friend satisfied with the arrangements, under the new dispensation, between himself and the Minister of Transport, and could he arrange for some fuller information to be given to the House at a fairly early date as to the progress being made?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: We have a very close and abiding interest in the propulsion of a warship. Perhaps I could add to what I said earlier. There is a study contract already placed with the Yarrow—Admiralty Research Department, and this is going ahead with our full support. I could not give an answer to the other part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question without consideration and deliberation with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport.

Dame Irene Ward: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the fact that everybody has asked the question that is to be answered tomorrow by the Minister of Transport in reply to a Question put by me that I tried to have put down to the Prime Minister, could I ask whether everybody will be in attendance tomorrow to hear the full facts?

Mr. Speaker: No.

Motor Transport Depôt, Newcastle-under-Lyme (Closure)

Mr. Swingler: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty on what date the motor transport depôt at Clayton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, was closed; how many workers were made redundant in consequence; and what efforts were made by his Department to find them alternative employment.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: Clayton Motor Transport Depôt closed on 23rd October. Of the 75 staff employed in April, 19 have been transferred to other work in Admiralty or Government service, 7 have retired or resigned and 49 were discharged. The names of these 49 have been registered in advance at the employment exchange, with the result that 46 have already found other jobs.

Mr. Swingler: It is satisfactory that that is so, but is the Civil Lord aware that many of the workers discharged are greatly dissatisfied about the procedure that was adopted; in the first place, because no real attempt seems to have been made by his Department to find them alternative employment and, secondly, because it is said that no facilities were given to employment exchange officers to go to this depôt to assist them in finding alternative jobs?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: In answer to the first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question, we had an obligation to the established staff which we carried out as meticulously as we could. On the non-established side, we notified their names to the local employment exchanges, and the very fact that 46 out of the 49—and of the other three, one retired because she was already 67 years old—were placed, does bear out that we took considerable trouble to see that they got a continuation of employment.

Dartmouth (Scholarships)

Mr. Dugdale: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty how many scholarships were available at Dartmouth this year; and how many candidates were unsuccessful.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: Ninety-six scholarships were available this year for eventual entry to Dartmouth. Six hundred and ninety-six candidates were unsuccessful.

Reserve Cadetships

Mr. Dugdale: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty what qualifications other than those of a high recommendation by the interview board are required of candidates for reserve cadetships; and to what extent the number of such cadetships is limited.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: Reserved cadetships are awarded to candidates who enter for the scholarship competition but just miss scholarships. Apart from passing at interview, candidates must have, therefore, approximately the same academic standard as boys awarded scholarships.
The number of reserved cadetships has so far not been limited to any particular figure.

Mr. Dugdale: Why is it not possible simply to take the next in the list of those who failed for scholarships, which would be the normal thing to do? Why has there to be a special interview to select people, whom the Commission may or may not like, regardless of whether they are highest in the list?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I think that everybody would agree that the Admiralty Interview Board is right in bearing in


mind not only academic standards, but the other standards—[HON. MEMBERS: "What are they?"] Standards of character—

Mr. Fernyhough: Accent.

Mr. Orr-Ewing: Since this question of accent has been taken up, perhaps I could put it right for the record. I quoted a letter from a Labour-dominated council—St. Helen's—which had the same fears on this issue. I was quoting that council's views. But at the Admiralty we do not take accent into account. We take into account the academic ability of the young person, but we also keep in mind the quality of the chap. An hon. Member from the opposite side of the House has recently been to see the Admiralty Interview Board at work and has told me that his anxieties have been set at rest, so I do not think that the anxieties that were shouted at me would really bear close examination. We are anxious to have the best chaps, wherever they may come from.

Mr. Dugdale: Is the Civil Lord aware that when I went to an interview board I personally was satisfied with the way in which it was conducted? I am not trying to make a personal attack on the interview board, but may I ask why it is not possible to have the same system for these particular special entries, or whatever they are called, as for scholarships? If there is an interview for a scholarship, why should not the result of that interview, together with the result of the academic test, be taken into account?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I apologise for getting drawn aside from the right hon. Gentleman's supplementary question by a wave of applause or disagreement from the benches opposite. I will consider the point which the right hon. Gentleman has made and I will write w him in explanation as to whether we take the exact academic list, following on down, for these reserved cadetships.

Re-engagement

Commander Courtney: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty the present state of the figures for re-engagement in the Royal Navy; and how these compare with those of previous years.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: Re-engagement for pension in the Royal Navy had risen steadily from 36 per cent. five years ago to 64 per cent. so far this year. This is the highest level since 1936 when the percentage re-engaging was 69 per cent.

Commander Courtney: While congratulating my hon. Friend on these really excellent figures, may I ask him to bear in mind that the long-term good of the Service requires that a success such as this on the lower deck be matched by corresponding success in relation to the entry of the young officer?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: We are very well aware of the need on the officer recruiting side, and I hope that the reserved cadetships and other institutions will help in that recruiting.

Mr. H. Hynd: Did I understand the Civil Lord to say, "re-engagement for pension"? Was not that a slip of the tongue and did he not mean "re-engagement for the honour and pleasure of serving in the Royal Navy?"

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I stand corrected.

Artificer Apprentices, Rosyth (Accommodation)

Mr. Willis: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty when it is proposed to commence the provision of new permanent living accommodation for the artificer apprentices at Rosyth.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: We plan to provide new living accommodation for the artificer apprentices in H.M.S. "Caledonia" as soon as the necessary funds are available. I hope to include the first half of the project, which will cost £225,000, in the 1961–62 works programme and the rest later on.

Mr. Willis: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that we have been told a number of times in the past that we would get this accommodation when the money was available? Could not he really make an effort to see that this work is commenced during the next financial year?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I am afraid that this is a question of priorities. We are anxious to try to renew all the old accommodation as quickly as we can, but there are many demands on the programme.


There is not only living accommodation. There is also instructional accommodation and much else which has to take its place. But we are sympathetic to the need to hurry on with this programme.

Exercise, Firth of Clyde (Mines)

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty what steps were taken to remove mines from the Firth of Clyde after the last naval manœuvres; and if he will in future consider taking steps to prevent mines damaging the nets of fishermen.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: No steps are taken to remove practice mines from the sea bed in exercise areas, but every effort is made to clear the areas of any mines remaining on the surface or so near to it as to endanger navigation; these practice mines are dummy mines and are not in themselves dangerous.
The exercise areas are chosen so as to minimise interference with fishing. The usual consultations were held before the Firth of Clyde exercise last May, and the naval authorities gave fishermen notice of this exercise.

Mr. Hughes: Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that a fisherman whose nets are torn and damaged—and they are very expensive—has a genuine grievance against the Admiralty? Will he sympathetically consider any claims for compensation that are sent to him?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: In reply to the first part of the supplementary question, we give notice through the liaison officers at the principal Scottish ports in order to try to avoid areas where trawling may take place. If the hon. Gentleman has in mind a specific case, perhaps he will send me details and I will certainly consider them.

H.M.S. "Hermes"

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty the cost of the aircraft carrier H.M.S. "Hermes"; and the estimated weekly cost of running it.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: The cost of H.M.S. "Hermes" is approximately £18 million.
H.M.S. "Hermes" is a major unit of the Fleet and the cost of running her

cannot be segregated from the cost of the Royal Navy as set out in Navy Estimates. However, the cost of oil fuel and other naval stores, under ordinary circumstances, will be about £8,000 a week, and the pay and allowances of her officers and men when she has her full complement, about £20,000 a week.

Mr. Hughes: Does not the hon. Gentleman think that this is an extraordinary sum to be paid for this expensive and obsolete monstrosity? This is the cost of a town. Has he nobody at the Admiralty capable of giving an approximate estimate of what this thing costs per week, apart from the cost of the oil?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I cannot agree with the first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question. I agree that this is expensive, but Britain must stand up for her interests in all parts of the world. As to the second part of the supplementary question, the cost is so obscure. For instance, do we take into account the cost of training all the personnel? Do we consider the cost of married quarters, pensions and so on? It is a difficult sum to calculate. I have given the House the best information I can.

Mr. Monslow: Does the Civil Lord agree that this vessel is well worth the cost, having regard to the fact that it was built by the finest craftsmen in the world, namely, those in Barrow-in-Furness?

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty the cost of the various aircraft that are to be operated from the aircraft carrier H.M.S. "Hermes".

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: The aircraft to be operated from H.M.S. "Hermes" will naturally vary from time to time, but their initial capital cost will be of the order of £10 million.

Mr. Hughes: Even though this vessel was built at Barrow-in-Furness, does not the Civil Lord think that this is a very large item of national expenditure? Does he really think that these aircraft carriers are worth while in this nuclear age and in the age of rockets?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: The hon. Gentleman should bear in mind that it is not only global war which may come, but there


may be limited wars, and the cold war still continues. These vessels play a very worth-while part in these types of war.

Civil Offences, South Africa

Mr. Reynolds: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty how many naval personnel have been charged with civil offences in South African courts; and what sentences were imposed

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: Over the past two years ten naval ratings have been charged in South African courts for civil offences; of this total, two cases were withdrawn and one man was acquitted. The maximum sentence imposed was six months imprisonment with compulsory labour and six strokes of the cane.

Mr. Reynolds: What representations has the hon. Gentleman made to the Government of South Africa with regard to the sentence of whipping imposed on a naval rating? Will he look into the application or possible extension of the Visiting Forces Act to the Union of South Africa and stop this kind of sentence being passed? May ask what instructions are given to officers and men of the Royal Navy visiting foreign ports about the peculiarities or ridiculous aspects of legislation in that country?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: My responsibility is to see that strict measures are taken to ensure that naval personnel, before they go ashore, are thoroughly warned on the current laws of South Africa, and I have assured myself that that is done very thoroughly. To put the matter in perspective, I would ask the hon. Gentleman to bear in mind that, even taking last year only, about 3,000 naval personnel went ashore, so this is a very small percentage of that number.

Oral Answers to Questions — SHIPBUILDING

Naval Building Programme

Dame Irene Ward: asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty whether he will accelerate the naval building programme to assist in maintaining work in the shipyards.

Mr. C. Ian Orr-Ewing: My right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport has already stated that he intends to study

in detail the problems of the shipbuilding industry. In so far as these could be relieved by an acceleration of naval building, such a measure will naturally come under careful review.

Dame Irene Ward: Will my hon. Friend bear in mind that shipyard workers and shipbuilders do not want to lose the skills that they lost in the 1930's when naval shipbuilding was brought to an end? Will my hon. Friend let me know when he would like me to accompany him to the Chancellor of the Exchequer?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: All I would say is that 90 per cent. of naval ships are built in commercial yards and that is a very considerable proportion of the load which they are carrying.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: Will my hon. Friend undertake to increase the publicity which already exists for the naval building programme? Is he aware that the United States Navy has not the slightest compunction in advertising to the world its naval building programme and the tour of duty of the units of the fleet? Yet the British Navy is not publicity-conscious. Is he also aware that I am convinced that this House would support a comparatively large extra sum on the Estimates—£100,000 or something of that kind—to publicise the doings of the Royal Navy at the present time?

Mr. Orr-Ewing: I know that my noble Friend the First Lord is aware of this point, as I am aware of it. The last First Lord gave details in the Naval Memorandum last year—far more thorough details than there have been in recent years. I will certainly bear the point in mind.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRITISH ARMY

Eaton Hall, Chester

Mr. Dodds: asked the Secretary of State for War what decision has been reached with regard to Eaton Hall, near Chester, in view of the long period his Department have not been able to find a use for the mansion.

The Secretary of State for War (Mr. Christopher Soames): I am afraid that I cannot yet make a statement, but I shall seek an opportunity of doing so as soon as a decision has been reached.

Mr. Dodds: Will the right hon. Gentleman be a little forthcoming about this, in view of the long time that this place has not been used and the mounting costs for dry rot? Will he explain why it has taken so long to come to a decision?

Mr. Soames: I must tell the hon. Gentleman that this is a matter which is exercising my mind very much and it has done so for a number of months now. This house was taken on a 99-year lease in 1947 at a time when the Army was very much larger than it is now. What we have to decide, now that we have no need for it as an O.C.T.U., is whether we are to alter the terms of the lease and put another unit in or whether we should endeavour to reach agreement with the estate to abandon the lease. Both of these courses involve very considerable expenditure. I am aware that it costs a considerable amount to keep and maintain the buildings while they are empty, but it is nothing compared with what the eventual decision will cost one way or the other. I am anxious that we should take the right decision. I am afraid that I must ask for a little more time before reaching a decision.

Mr. Fernyhough: Has the right hon. Gentleman ever considered consulting the Minister of Education? There are many people who think that this building would make an admirable teacher training college, and, as such facilities are needed, will he consult his right hon. Friend to see whether it could be used for that purpose?

Mr. Soames: I assure the hon. Gentleman that I have not been backward in consulting my colleagues about the future use of this place.

Surplus Boots

Mr. Dodds: asked the Secretary of State for War how much has been realised from the sale of 1,250,000 surplus boots; and how this compares with the cost of purchase.

Mr. Soames: The sale of these boots is not yet complete.

Mr. Dodds: Will the right hon. Gentleman explain why? Is it a fact that these boots, which cost nearly £2 a pair, have been on sale at from 8s. 6d. to 10s. a pair? Is not he well aware that there

are plenty of buyers to take them at that rate? Why has it taken so long? Can he deny that this blunder arose because, in 1955 and 1956, the War Office insisted on ordering these boots when the provisioning depôt said that they were not required? Is not the secret of the whole thing that somebody had the brainwave that, if these boots were not made, the Ministry of Supply would show a loss on the special leather it held if the leather had to be sold?

Mr. Soames: I will endeavour to answer those questions briefly. As I told the hon. Gentleman when he asked me a Question some months ago, the boots were handed over by the War Office to the Ministry of Supply for sale, and that handing over was completed some months back now. The Ministry of Supply thought it right not to put all these boots on the market at the same time—the hon. and learned Members for Northampton (Mr. Paget) will know the reason for that—but to market them in such a way as to attract the best price over a period of time. Now the moment has arrived when the Ministry of Supply is no longer responsible, for it does not exist any longer, and I am myself responsible for the sale of these boots. I can tell the hon. Gentleman that there is another lot to go out for tender in a few weeks' time.

Mr. Paget: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that, however much these boots may be passed, Northampton is extremely concerned about his activities in running a cut-price shop?

Mr. Soames: That is not strictly true. As the hon. and learned Gentleman knows, we are sending these boots for export.

Discipline

Mr. Shinwell: asked the Secretary of State for War whether he is satisfied that his present statutory powers of imposing discipline on officers and other ranks in the Army are adequate; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Soames: Yes, Sir. I would refer the right hon. Member to the debate on the Army Act which took place on 12th November.

Mr. Shinwell: I am much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for that reply. Can he say whether, since his power to impose discipline is derived from the


Army Act, he requires any additional assistance in order to impose discipline on officers and other ranks in the Army, and whether the declaration made by the Minister of Defence recently, that he must vet any lectures delivered by Army officers, was in accordance with the Army Act?

Mr. Soames: That has nothing whatever to do with discipline. Where discipline is concerned, it is incumbent upon an officer, if he proposes to make a public statement of the character which the hon. Gentleman has in mind, to submit that public statement to the War Office. I am responsible for passing it or not passing it. Where the matter touches inter-Departmental arrangements, naturally, if a speech which an officer wished to make touched, for instance, on colonial affairs or foreign affairs, I—it would be my responsibility, not the responsibility of the officer—would check, from the point of view of purely administrative and Governmental arrangements, with the Colonial Office or the Foreign Office on whether the content of the speech was suitable. Similarly, now, when it comes to making speeches on broad defence policy, I shall refer them to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Defence who is, of course, responsible for the overall defence policy of the Government.

Mr. Shinwell: While that may he so, if a high-ranking officer makes a speech on a matter of defence which is of a global character, no doubt the Minister of Defence might wish to butt in, but where the subject of discipline arises, namely, in connection with an act by a high-ranking officer, are we to understand that the exclusive right for imposing discipline is vested in the right hon. Gentleman and in no other Member of the Government?

Mr. Soames: Yes, Sir, that is so.

Captain Pilkington: Has my right hon. Friend considered applying to the Army the new disciplinary code as laid down by the Labour Party?

Mr. Mellish: In view of the fact that General Cowley recently made a statement which, we understand, was vetted by the right hon. Gentleman's Department and approved, yet the Minister of Defence deprecated that, may we have

some indication of the co-ordination between the Minister of Defence and the Secretary of State for War?

Mr. Soames: I went into this in more detail in the debate on the Army Act a week or so ago, when I explained my reasons for passing the speech which was submitted to me by General Cowley.

Mr. Bellenger: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Are you aware that the Secretary of State is not informing the House correctly about what happened on the Army Estimates debate the other day? Your Deputy in the Chair did—

Mr. Speaker: It was not on the Army Estimates. The debate referred to, I suppose, is the debate on the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill.

Mr. Mellish: Further to that point of order. With very great respect—

Mr. Speaker: I do not think that the right hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Bellenger) has finished. I was trying to get back to the substance of it.

Mr. Bellenger: I was merely trying to call your attention, Sir, to the fact that it was not correct to say that we were permitted to debate it.

Mr. Mellish: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. In effect, the Secretary of State has said that he explained the details of this in question and answer in a certain debate recently. In fact, that is not so, and we are very much concerned about the fact that the right hon. Gentleman approved a speech which was later disapproved by the Minister of Defence. What I think we have a right to ask, and what my right hon. Friend was trying to ask, is whether or not there is any co-ordination, and who, at the end of the day, decides who is to say what?

Mr. Speaker: There is some difficulty about asking that in relation to this Question. It does not arise out of it.

Small Arms Ammunition

Mr. Strachey: asked the Secretary of State for War if he is satisfied that the standard small arms ammunition within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will be satisfactory for the new British automatic rifle; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Soames: The British rifle is designed to fire N.A.T.O. standard ammunition.

Mr. Strachey: If that is so, is the new German rifle which, we hear, the German Army has chosen instead of the F.N. rifle, also to fire N.A.T.O. ammunition, or are all these elaborate efforts at co-ordination going to break down?

Mr. Soames: I understand that the German round is smaller than the standard N.A.T.O. round. It is not, of course, for me to comment on what prompted the German Army to choose it.

Mr. Strachey: This is a serious matter, and it would seem to indicate that all the efforts which delayed the introduction of the rifle to the British Army for about ten years have come to nothing. Standardisation of the ammunition is the key point. It does not matter whether the rifles are different. It is a most serious matter if we are now told that the ammunition is different.

Mr. Soames: There is a broad measure of standardisation of weapons and ammunition within N.A.T.O., but I cannot answer for what the Germans may do.

Mr. Strachey: Is the right hon. Gentleman telling us that the measure of standardisation is so broad that the ammunition will not fit different rifles?

Radar and Electronic Equipment

Mr. Strachey: asked the Secretary of State for War how, and to whom, he will make known the Army's requirements for radar and electronic equipment; how these requirements will be co-ordinated with those of the other Services; and how they will be met.

Mr. Soames: The arrangements will be as in the past except that the Ministry of Aviation will take the place of the Ministry of Supply.

Mr. Strachey: This means that nothing has been done, so far as we can see, in these rearrangements except to make the Service equipment even more cumbrous than it was before. As far as we can see, this means that the matter must now go through the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of Aviation and

that there will be two intermediaries between the War Office. How the other Services will co-ordinate their demands for radar I simply do not know.

Mr. Soames: The situation with regard to radar and electronic equipment is exactly as it was before vis-à-vis the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Aviation, except that it is the Ministry of Aviation instead of the Ministry of Supply.

Aden (Accommodation)

Mr. Ross: asked the Secretary of State for War what steps have been, and are being, taken to provide adequate permanent accommodation for Army personnel in Aden.

Mr. Soames: Sixteen new barrack huts are nearly complete. They will provide air-conditioned sleeping accommodation for 640 men. A second contract has recently been placed for 240 married quarters and air-conditioned barracks for an infantry battalion. The first block should be ready in ten months and the rest by the summer of 1961. A third contract will be let in the spring to provide messes and offices. Those are the principal measures. We are also putting up camps with air-conditioned sleeping quarters for a number of troops who would otherwise be under canvas or in overcrowded huts. Any further building will depend on the size of the permanent garrison of Aden.

Mr. Mellish: How many of our personnel are in Aden? We have heard that 640 men will have air-conditioned accommodation.

Mr. Soames: This is related to a Question which the hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) asked me last week about the number at present living in tented accommodation in Aden. The Answer was about 700.

Mr. Kershaw: My right hon. Friend did not say in his Answer whether married quarters are to be air-conditioned. I should like to know whether they are. If not, will it not be very hot for married couples in Aden?

Mr. Soames: There will be a measure of air conditioning in married quarters.

Oral Answers to Questions — TELEPHONE SERVICE

New Exchange, Willenhall

Mr. Stonehouse: asked the Postmaster-General when he expects the new telephone exchange at Willenhall will be completed; and when it will become operational.

The Postmaster-General (Mr. Reginald Bevins): The new building should be completed by October. 1960, and I expect the exchange to be operational towards the end of 1961.

Mr. Stonehouse: While appreciating that reply, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he is aware that the bad service, particularly during peak hours, has been a severe handicap to industrial concerns in Willenhall? Will the right hon. Gentleman expedite the completion of this exchange?

Mr. Bevins: I am aware that the service in Willenhall is not all that it should be, but the present exchange caters, I think, for about 1,300 subscribers. The new exchange will cater for about 1,800, and we shall have it on subscriber trunk dialling by 1964 at the latest.

Commonwealth Coaxial Cable

Mr. Biggs-Davison: asked the Postmaster-General when the Commonwealth round-the-world coaxial telephone cable will be laid.

Mr. Bevins: The first stage will be the completion in 1961 of the link between Canada and the United Kingdom. A conference, recently concluded in Sydney, has recommended that the net stage should be the completion by 1964 of a cable linking Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The Government of the United Kingdom expect to reach early conclusions on this proposal, and I am confident that the other Commonwealth Governments will also reach decisions soon. I cannot yet forecast a timetable for further links.

Acton

Mr. Holland: asked the Postmaster-General how many telephone subscribers there are in Acton; and the number of applicants waiting for telephone service.

Mr. Bevins: There are 9,400 telephone subscribers in Acton and 130 applicants waiting. These figures are estimates, because Acton is served by four telephone exchanges. Over 600 telephones have been provided during the past twelve months.

Mr. Holland: While thanking my right hon. Friend for that reply, may I ask him to state the average waiting time for telephones in the area?

Mr. Bevins: The average waiting time is between two and three months, but we hope in January next year to put down a new cable, which should help substantially.

Oral Answers to Questions — POST OFFICE

European Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (Conference)

Mr. Russell: asked the Postmaster-General the function of the Conference of European Postal and Telecommunications Administrations; and what part his Department will play in the Conference.

Mr. Bevins: The Conference of European Postal and Telecommunications Administrations was set up following a meeting in Montreux in June, 1959. The Arrangement was signed by the Administrations of nineteen countries including the United Kingdom. The new Conference is essentially consultative. It aims to exchange views and information and to initiate studies of technical problems of particular concern to Europe. It will concentrate mainly on work of a practical nature to improve the efficiency of the European postal and telecommunications services. My Department has taken, and will continue to take, its full part in the work of the Conference.

Mr. Russell: I thank my right hon. Friend for that Answer. May I ask him whether he will take up at the Conference the question of the different times it takes for letters to go from one country to another in Europe, because these times vary considerably? Will he see whether he can get more uniformity among European postal services?

Mr. Bevins: That is a matter which might be studied.

Mr. Ness Edwards: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether any of the so-called Iron Curtain countries are now inside the Conference?

Mr. Bevins: I believe not.

Telegraph Service

Mr. Ross: asked the Postmaster-General if he will make a statement on the future of the telegraph service.

Mr. Bevins: In its Report of last year, the Advisory Committee, under Sir Leonard Sinclair's Chairmanship, endorsed the continuance of a nation-wide inland telegraph service. The Committee regarded it as an essential, though shrinking, part of our communication facilities, while recognising that a substantial deficit was unavoidable. A Joint Departmental Committee is now considering how the service can be made to operate more efficiently and more economically in the light of the Advisory Committee's Report. No change in the telegraph tariff is at present contemplated.

Oral Answers to Questions — WIRELESS AND TELEVISION

Programmes (Gramophone Records)

Mr. Mason: asked the Postmaster-General if he will use his powers under subsection (4) of section 15 of the Licence and Agreement and subsection (2) of Section 9 of the Television Act, 1954, to require the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television Authority to refrain from broadcasting "Cool for Cats" and other similar record boosting programmes, in view of the discrimination which is taking place.

Mr. Bevins: No, Sir. The hon. Member should send any evidence he has to the B.B.C. or I.T.A. if he is suggesting that there is any irregular discrimination in selection and playing of records for broadcasting by performers or staff employed by the B.B.C. or I.T.A. programme contractors. These are matters for the broadcasting organisations who have assured me that they will receive most careful attention.

Mr. Mason: I am much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for that reply, but I think that I have a case for examination under the subsections of the Act which I mentioned in my Question, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will later consider the matter. First, is he aware that disc jockeys are, in many instances, responsible for the selection of their records and are employed by recording companies, such as Pye, Decca and E.M.I., and as employees of those companies are subject to pressure? This in itself may lead to undesirable practices. Further, is he aware that there is an American company called Aberbach, with subsidiary companies in this country, three of which have recording managers as partners? One of these partners, in particular, is a television producer. This in itself is an undesirable association. Will the right hon. Gentleman consider looking into the matter?

Mr. Bevins: The practices within the gramophone record industry are not a matter for the Postmaster-General, but the powers to which the hon. Member has referred have always been treated by successive Governments as reserve powers. I very much doubt whether the House would wish me to use those Dowers in order to prohibit certain types of programme. Both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. have told me that they have no reason whatever to suppose that there is any substance in the alleged irregularities, but, as I say, they will gladly consider any evidence submitted to them.

Mr. Chetwynd: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that within the B.B.C. there are ample means for putting this matter right if there is abuse, regardless of the rights or wrongs of my hon. Friend's case? Also, is he aware that, in spite of what fuddy-duddies in this House may think, these programmes are extremely popular with teen-agers?

Mr. Bevins: I think that what the hon. Gentleman says was implicit in my reply. In answer to the second part of his supplementary question, I entirely agree that television has to cater for the taste of those who are young in spirit as well as the taste of those who have lost their youthful aspirations.

Mr. Ness Edwards: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that these serious allegations which were contained in the


Press at the weekend are matters which should cause some concern, particularly in the realm of commercial television? Is he aware that this is a very artificial world; and, in looking at the little fish, will the right hon. Gentleman also look at the bigger ones, the programme contractors who buy publishing firms and use producers to boost their own products? While the I.T.A. and the B.B.C. have to cater for young people, will the right hon. Gentleman ensure that young people are not exploited in the interests of commercial organisations?

Mr. Bevins: Of course, if these allegations were proved to have substance, I entirely agree that it would indeed be a serious matter. But the truth is that neither I nor the authorities know what the allegations are.

BILL PRESENTED

GAME LAWS (AMENDMENT)

Bill to make better provision for the prevention of poaching, presented by Mr. Kimball; supported by Sir Henry Studholme, Sir Spencer Summers, Mr. John Hobson, Mr. Simon Wingfield Digby, Mr. Deedes, Mr. Robert Cooke, Mr. Speir, and Mr. du Cann; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Friday, 29th January, and to be printed. [Bill 43.]

COTTON INDUSTRY (COMPENSA TION FOR REDUNDANCY)

3.30 p.m.

Mr. Leslie Hale: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for the interpretation and enforcement of an agreement providing compensation for redundancy in the cotton industry made between employers and workmen in August, 1959; and for purposes connected therewith.
I say at once that I seek leave to introduce this Measure entirely on my own responsibility. The application for leave does not imply in any way any criticism of the parties to the agreement. All the information I have is that both employers and workmen are doing their utmost to secure a fair interpretation of a highly complex agreement, arrived at under pressure of time, relating to a vast variety of problems, which was of interest to about 50,000 workers. But, also, I understand that there is much delay and anxiety. The position of hon. Members representing textile constituencies is rapidly becoming intolerable, because we cannot get any information and we are inundated with questions to which we cannot given an answer.
I do not wish to direct any criticism to the President of the Board of Trade today. [HON. MEMBERS "Why not?"] I would sometimes, but not on this occasion. Indeed, it was a Member on the other side of the House who wrote:
This officer, all will allow,
Is grossly overpaid.
There wasn't any Board and now
There isn't any trade.
So far as I know, the President of the Board of Trade would be anxious and willing to help, but by the rules of the House he finds himself compelled to a vow of silence and he has to say reluctantly that he cannot give us any information about these important matters, because the rules preclude it.
The custom of the House prescribes that if the President of the Board of Trade says that, whether it be true or not, as long as he thinks it is true, Members cannot put Questions to him because the Table must refuse Questions if the right hon. Gentleman says that he has no responsibility. My Bill would give the right hon. Gentleman a responsibility and the opportunity that, I


feel, he craves to have to make a democratic explanation to the House of the very grave difficulties that have arisen.
I should like to give the House one or two brief particulars. Of course, I cannot even guarantee that they are precisely authentic, because we have no means of getting precise particulars. Many mills have closed for up to six months. The agreement provided that the first payment of compensation should be made on the second Friday after closing. Many workers have not yet received a penny. The total amount paid in compensation up to this moment is less than was given to one football pool winner last week by a football pool firm. The highest figure which I have been given is that about £170,000 has been paid in compensation to 3,400 out of 9,000 claimants who have lodged their applications. I believe that figure to be approximately accurate.
But whatever provisions are made for an appeals board, for consideration of difficulties, and so on, there remains the difficulty at the mill level, and it is at the mill level that difficulties arise. If I may be forgiven for saying so, it is in Oldham, too, that difficulties specially arise, because there we have the Oldham Operative Spinners' Association that caters exclusively for the craft union of mule spinners, which is likely to lose half of its members. I am told that, for their part, the position has been reached in which the agreement is rapidly becoming unworkable.
The agreement provides for compensation for workers who have served out a notice given by the employers and who have left with the employers' permission. What happens to those who have served out a notice given by themselves? It remains in doubt. The agreement provides that compensation shall be payable to those who have lost their employment after 23rd April this year. Suppose, however, that a mill were temporarily closed and the men were temporarily stopped at that time and the mill had been closed after that date without their resuming work. Are they qualified or are they not? All these problems arise and they are very grave problems.
There is very great disappointment in Lancashire, because it now seems that of the figure referred to by the Prime Minister as compensation to be poured

into Lancashire—in a speech, admittedly, made under rather unusual circumstances, at a special time—apparently about 96 per cent. is to go to shareholders and about 4 per cent. at the most may go to the workers, if and when they get it; and of the original estimate of 40,000 workers who were expected to benefit, the figure is now 25,000. As I say, 9,000 have lodged their claims. There is, of course, the special difficulty of workers who were not wise enough to be members of a union. They are entitled to have their claims examined, presented, and so on, but at the moment no machinery is provided for them.
I desire to make it clear to the House that the Bill that I seek to introduce is not controversial. I do not seek to alter the agreement. I do not seek to criticise any of the parties. I seek only leave to introduce a Measure which will enable the President of the Board of Trade to interpret, endorse and make the provisions which are essentially necessary; because there is the final problem that our law, in its infinite wisdom, has never provided any adequate recourse for the individual party to a collective agreement. He is faced with the possibility that if his claim is disputed he can only have recourse to the expensive and rather long-winded procedure of the county court; and unless he has the help of his trade union he is unlikely even to have that opportunity.
In those circumstances, this Motion is one that the House might well agree to so that we can have an opportunity of discussing the Bill in due course. I ask for no more than that. I do it humbly, making no criticism. It is a cant phrase in our courts that justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done. I would add to that that it is even more important in democracy that, if injustice is being done, it should be seen to be done and that the light of our democracy should shine upon these difficulties. It is in that hope that I humbly ask the House for leave to introduce this Measure.

Mr. Speaker: Who will prepare and bring in the Bill?

Mr. E. Fernyhough: On a point of order. I did not hear you collect the voices, Mr. Speaker, and I wondered whether other hon. Members had.

Mr. Speaker: I am in error. I am afraid that I presumed from the absence of objection that there was none.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Leslie Hale, Mr. Mapp, Mr. Sydney Silverman, Mrs. Castle, and Mr. Frank Allaun.

COTTON INDUSTRY (COMPENSATION FOR REDUNDANCY)

Bill to provide for the interpretation and enforcement of an agreement providing compensation for redundancy in the cotton industry made between employers and workmen in August, 1959; and for purposes connected therewith, presented accordingly and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Monday next and to be printed. [Bill 44.]

Orders of the Day — COMMONWEALTH SCHOLARSHIPS BILL

Order for Second reading read.

3.40 p.m.

The Minister of State, Commonwealth Relations Office (Mr. C. J. M. Alport): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The purpose of this Bill is to give effect to some of the recommendations of the Commonwealth Education Conference which was held at Oxford in June of this year. I think that it would be appropriate if, to begin with, I said something in more detail about the conference. The House will remember that this was called in consequence of certain decisions which were made at the Commonwealth Trade and Economic Conference held in Montreal in 1958.
The great distinction of the delegations which attended the Oxford conference, the harmony of its proceedings and the practical idealism of the plan which it drew up, make it a remarkable example of Commonwealth co-operation at its very best. It forms part of the infrastructure of the modern Commonwealth which it is our purpose progressively to strengthen and extend. The attention of the public here and overseas tends to be concentrated upon the political relationships of the Commonwealth countries, but we must never allow opinion either here or overseas to underestimate the importance of the work which we can do together in the field of technology and social science, trade and finance, art and, above all, I think, education.
The decisions of the 1959 Oxford conference, which will be followed by a second conference to be held in India in 1961, marked, in our view, the opening of a new era of Commonwealth co-operation in education. Just as Ottawa was a turning point in our trade relationships a quarter of a century ago, so Oxford, we believe, will be regarded as a turning point in the field of education in the next generation. As at Ottawa, the decisions reached at Oxford were based upon the principle of mutual assistance. Each Commonwealth country has something to give and something to gain in accordance with its differing needs and resources.
As far as the scholarship and fellowship plan itself is concerned, it will introduce a greater measure of what one may term academic mobility throughout the Commonwealth at a time when the men and women concerned are at the formative period of their professional careers. It will provide a continuous exchange of ideas and knowledge by giving them access to the rich and varied intellectual resources and technical experience of the different Commonwealth countries. It will, we hope, go far to create in a very real and literal sense a Commonwealth of the mind, which, applied to the social, economic and political problems of our time, may provide us with answers which we in the workaday world of public affairs sometimes find so elusive.
The target for scholarships and fellowships which the Oxford conference set itself was 1,000, and of these, as the House knows, the United Kingdom has undertaken to find 500. In addition, the Oxford conference recognised that it was not sufficient merely to cater for the training and development of potential leaders—to quote from the report of the conference.
men and women of intellectual promise who may be expected to make a significant contribution to the life of their own countries.
Throughout the Commonwealth, and particularly among the newer members, there is an urgency for more teachers, and proposals were, therefore, made for the training of teachers from countries where teacher training resources are insufficient, as well as to encourage teachers from those countries like the United Kingdom to go overseas to take up key posts in places where the lack of trained teachers is a serious handicap to social and economic progress.
It is estimated that about 2,500 teachers leave the United Kingdom annually for service in the Commonwealth, but we can and, I believe the House will agree, we must provide more for the future, and particularly we must ensure that the teachers who go, go increasingly to the less developed countries where their services and help are so urgently required.
Finally, the conference recognised the vital importance of improved technical education, particularly in the newer

Commonwealth countries wrestling with the problems of raising the standards of living of their people by increased industrialisation and the more intensive exploitation of their natural resources. It was agreed at the conference that in the whole field of the scholarship plan, teacher training and teacher provision, proper emphasis should be given to technical education.
I should, perhaps, at this point remind the House that it is proposed to set up a Commonwealth education liaison committee composed of one representative from each member country and from Nigeria, and with the United Kingdom appointing a member to represent the dependent territories of the Commonwealth, and that this committee will follow up and report progress on the schemes agreed at the Oxford conference and will consider suggestions for the improvement and extension of Commonwealth co-operation in the whole educational field in the future.
Those suggestions will be submitted to the 1961 Commonwealth education conference and will be considered there. As the House, I think, already knows, Sir Philip Morris, Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University and the distinguished chairman of the Oxford conference, has agreed to be chairman of this liaison committee and we are very grateful indeed to him for taking up that appointment.
The Bill that we are considering to-day deals only with the scholarship and fellowship plan. Action on the other matters discussed at the conference, that is, the training of Commonwealth students at technical colleges, teacher-training and the provision of teachers to go abroad, is proceeding at present. My right hon. Friends the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland are receiving the wholehearted co-operation of the education authorities in working out the plans here in the United Kingdom. If legislation is necessary to deal with any of these matters it will be laid before the House in due course.
We have, however, thought it right to press on with this Bill because we are aiming at making available the first 250 United Kingdom scholarships to be taken up at the beginning of the


academic year in the autumn of 1960. Some preliminary work has already been done, but if we are to succeed in our object then the machinery for selection must come into being in January and the actual process of selection must be completed by April or May. If the Bill, therefore, were to be passed before Christmas we should be in a position to get ahead with the scholarship and fellowship plan, which, I am sure the House will agree, is in itself a vitally important element in the whole scheme.
I think that I should explain that the distinction between scholarships, on the one hand, and fellowships, on the other, is that the former will be available, for the most part, to men and women who have recently graduated and will be available for post-graduate and research work. For the most part, these men and women will be between the ages of 22 and 28, and the maximum age for them will be 35. Fellowships, on the other hand, will be given usually for one year to established scholars wishing to make or to renew contact with recent developments overseas in the field of knowledge in which they are already recognised authorities.
In addition, scholarships may be awarded in special cases for undergraduate courses to candidates who come from countries where no such courses are available at institutions of their own, and in other cases scholarships, as opposed to fellowships, may be awarded for training in the arts, music and crafts at specialised institutions outside the field of the universities and technical colleges.
I think that the House as a whole will feel that the Bill, accompanied by the White Paper, is largely self-explanatory. It sets up a Commission, which will be charged with the duty of selecting men and women from Commonwealth countries to come to the United Kingdom to take up these scholarships and fellowships which we have on offer here. It will make arrangements for placing them at appropriate universities or colleges of technology, and will supervise their work during what will normally be the two academic years during which the scholarships are current.
Secondly, it has the duty of making the preliminary selection of candidates from the United Kingdom for considera-

tion for scholarships offered to us by countries overseas. The Secretary of State is further empowered by the Bill to assign to the Commission other duties in relation to the general administration of the scheme. Responsibility for the day-to-day administrative work on the academic side, as the White Paper points out, will be undertaken by the Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth, which is a body well equipped for this particular task. The British Council has undertaken responsibility for the supervision of the general welfare of scholars and fellows while they are in this country.
I know that the House will attach particular importance to ensuring that students coming here, in addition to having facilities for study and research, will have an opportunity of entering fully into ordinary life in Britain, particularly during vacation time. Special attention will be paid to this by the British Council in the organisation which it is setting up for the purpose of looking after the welfare problems of students coming to the United Kingdom. The administrative focal point of the whole scheme will be, we hope, and I think the House will agree, very appropriately, at Marlborough House.
The House might like to know broadly the process of selection of candidates for scholarships in the United Kingdom. Each Commonwealth country is in the process of setting up a body which, if not actually similar in composition and status to our Commission, will have broadly the same duties as the Commission to which the Bill refers. Applicants will be selected by these bodies for submission to our Commission, and our Commission will select applicants, whose names will be forwarded with their records and all necessary documents by the overseas bodies, maintaining a broad balance between the older members of the Commonwealth, the newer members of the Commonwealth and the dependent territories.
In both the placing of the overseas scholars in the United Kingdom and the selection of students from the United Kingdom for scholarships overseas, the Commission will have available the honorary services of 40 distinguished United Kingdom scholars and scientists


to assist it. Their advice will be available to ensure that when a candidate for a scholarship here is accepted for some particular subject or research in some matter, he or she goes to the institution most likely to provide the most appropriate facilities for carrying on those studies in this country. Similarly, the advice of the 40 consultants, so to speak, will be available in the selection of applicants from this country who are candidates for scholarships overseas.
There is one more point in the Bill to which I think I should draw the attention of the House at this stage. In Clause 1 (7), it is made clear that decisions with regard to the selection of candidates is a matter solely for the Commission, and is not in any way the responsibility of my noble Friend the Secretary of State. This ensures that the Commission has complete freedom in the selection of individuals for scholarships here or in recommending candidates for scholarships overseas, and I think that the House will agree that it is fully in accordance with the principle of academic freedom, to which we in this country attach such great importance.

Mr. Paul Williams: While accepting that what my hon. Friend has said is very important, may I ask him whether he could give the House an assurance that this will not lead to such freedom that those who are selected to acquire these scholarships are weighted in favour of legal studies, as opposed to the more practical arts and sciences needed in many Commonwealth and Colonial Territories?

Mr. Alport: I think that the Commission must be free to decide these matters itself, but my hon. Friend can be perfectly assured on this. If he has, as I know he has, studied the report of the Oxford conference, he will have seen the great emphasis which was placed by that conference on an obligation for technical education, and it was agreed that that principle should apply, not only in teacher training, but also in scholarships. I can assure my hon. Friend that the point will be very firmly borne in mind by all those concerned with the administration of the scheme in the United Kingdom.
I was about to point out to the House that, from the financial point of view, the

cost of this scheme will be £2,300,000 during the first five years. The House may wonder why there is a discrepancy between that figure and the figure which I gave in answer to a Question not long ago, when I mentioned £6 million. The rest of the money we have in mind for financing it will be available for other parts of the scheme, such as teacher training and teacher provision. It is quite possible that in due course consideration will be given to whether it is possible or desirable to extend this part of the scheme, but we must have some experience of its working before any decision can be taken on that.

Mr. Hector Hughes: May I ask the hon. Gentleman to deal with an aspect of the matter which I think he has omitted, though I may be wrong? Would he tell the House whether the other Commonwealth Governments are acting in a way similar to the way in which he wishes us to act? Are they taking steps to implement the report of the Oxford conference?

Mr. Alport: I can give the hon. and learned Gentleman an assurance on that, although this is a matter entirely for them. I think that he will be aware that the obligations undertaken by other Commonwealth countries after the Oxford conference were substantial and proportionate to our own. He will remember that Canada is to provide 250 scholarships and fellowships; Australia, 100; India, 100; Pakistan, 30; New Zealand, 25; the Federation of Malaya, 12; Ghana, 10; the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 10; Ceylon, 6; and East Africa, 4. Therefore, the hon. and learned Gentleman may be assured that, having undertaken these obligations, the Commonwealth countries themselves will be taking similar steps to our own to give effect to their commitments.

Mr. Hughes: I am much obliged. I am sorry to press the matter, but does the hon. Gentleman not realise that it is very important that the Commonwealth Governments should act pari passu in this matter and should take steps similar to those that we are taking today? I should like to know whether they are doing so.

Mr. Alport: To be quite honest about it, our business is to get on with carrying out our own commitments, but the hon.


and learned Member can be assured that our friends in the Commonwealth will be just as anxious to carry out their commitments as we are in the House.
I feel confident that the House will feel that this new initiative in Commonwealth co-operation is one very warmly to be welcomed. I said at the beginning of my speech that I believed it to be a new era. It would be wrong, however, not to acknowledge the immense contribution which has already been made through the Rhodes Scholarships, the Athlone Fellowships and the Colombo Plan and many other similar schemes which have pioneered Commonwealth education in the past. I hope that when the new design springing from the Oxford conference is in being its influence will spread far beyond education.
During past generations there has been a constant flow of men and women from this country seeking opportunities for service overseas where the prospects provide them with a life's career. The changing circumstances of the Commonwealth today are gradually reducing the number of these opportunities. On the other hand, the prospects which are open to people to go abroad for periods of two to five years to work or study in the Commonwealth are becoming increasingly abundant. But many of those who would be only too glad to take advantage of these opportunities are perhaps deterred from doing so by the fear that absence from this country at perhaps a critical time in their careers will be damaging to their future prospects when they return home.
I am convinced that we must, somehow or other, change this. In future, a period of service or study in the Commonwealth must be regarded not as a possible handicap, but as an essential qualification for a successful career in the professions, in industry and technology here in the United Kingdom.
This involves some change in the attitude of mind of public authorities and employers generally throughout the country. I believe that this scholarship and fellowship plan, together with proposals for teacher-training and teacher provision, will go some way to bring about this change of mind. That is why I say that I think that this marks a new era and one which can have immense consequences throughout the whole field

of the Commonwealth co-operation of tomorrow. It is for this reason, and because of the intrinsic value of the Commonwealth scholarship and fellowship plan to the Commonwealth as a whole, that I ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading.

4.4 p.m.

Mr. H. A. Marquand: On this side of the House we share fully the pleasure which the Minister of State has expressed in the success of the Commonwealth Education Conference. I was glad to hear from him today that not only is the particular piece with which we shall be concerned for the next hour or two going ahead but that the other parts of the plan set out by the Commonwealth Education Conference are also going ahead according to intention.
The timetable has really been quite remarkable. The Commonwealth Trade and Economic Conference made recommendations for developments on educational lines in September, 1958. The Commonwealth Education Conference met at Oxford in July, 1959, and now we have the Bill introduced in November, 1959, and we are told, and we are glad to hear it, that it is hoped that the first Commonwealth scholars will take their places in the various universities and colleges in the autumn of 1960.
It is a very remarkable achievement for what, after all, is an international agreement to discussions to which large numbers of different Governments had to send delegates and in which various points of view in discussion had to be reconciled and fitted together. It proves that in the Commonwealth we can understand one another easily, and that when we agree we can act quickly. We must all rejoice in this and give credit to all the Commonwealth Governments, not excluding Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom on this occasion.
The Oxford conference was a fully representative conference from all Commonwealth countries, though for reasons which I am sure we all regret the nature of the representation from some of the Colonial Territories was not as fully representative perhaps as it was from the self-governing territories.
We have to deal today only with our own United Kingdom contribution. It


seems that the contribution recommended to us—that we should provide 500 of these places out of a total of about 1,000—is just about right. It would be wrong if we were to be too niggardly and if we were not to make a generous gesture. Equally, it would be wrong if we suggested in our Commonwealth plans that the great majority of students should come to study in this country. It is very important, and I am glad that the Minister underlined it, to realise that study by United Kingdom scholars in other parts of the Commonwealth is every bit as valuable as study by scholars from the overseas parts of the Commonwealth in this country.
The purpose set out in paragraph 12 of the Report of the Commonwealth Education Conference admirably sums up what we have in mind. It says of the plan that
It will enrich each country of the Commonwealth by enabling an increasing number of its abler citizens to share the wide range of educational resources available throughout the Commonwealth and thus promote equality of educational opportunity at the highest level.
I am sure that we can learn as much from them as they can learn from us, and I am glad to think that the acceptances already made by fully self-governing and some not quite fully self-governing constituents of the Commonwealth will make it possible for this exchange of students to spread all the way from British Columbia in the West to Malaya in the East.
We are really setting out to girdle the globe with this new plan. That may sound a little like painting the map red, but the purpose here is not conquest or subjection. It is not merely furtherance of trade. We aim not at the exchange of goods but the exchange of ideas, not at the exploration of territories in order to found an Empire but at the exploration of ideas to free the human spirit.
It is because the plan has this broad vision that we on this side of the House particularly welcome it and I am glad that the Minister of State said what he did about the essential requirement in future of scholarship in this country that our scholars should have and take regularly the opportunity of studying in Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, in the University College of the West Indies, in

Ibadan, or wherever it may be in the Commonwealth.
They can and will enrich their experience by going to these places. It would be fatal if the old narrow viewpoint which used to prevail when I began university teaching, was to continue, namely, that if one went overseas one would never be able to get back again. I hope that what we do today will put an end to that feeling in the universities, if it exists. I hope that young men will feel that by going to these colleges and studying for a time overseas they will not only not limit opportunities to come back eventually to this country, but will widen and improve their opportunities of so doing.
I am glad that the report of the Oxford conference says that, in the main, the awards should be for a period of postgraduate study or research. It does not make this exclusive, but it emphasises what I think is very important—that the newer universities and university colleges, like that of the West Indies, which I happened to visit only a few months ago, should have the opportunity of training in their own institutions their own men and women in the early stages of their education, so that they can build up their sense of nationhood in their own territories and that their young people can have a full opportunity of university education of the highest quality while they are still comparatively immature and then, strengthened by that experience, and fortified by a good education in their own areas, will be able to go abroad when they are more mature and gain full advantage from overseas education.
Speaking from personal experience, I am sure that this will be more valuable to them than going abroad straight from their secondary education, when they are still comparatively immature, when the difficulties of adjustment to a different environment are so great for young people, when they feel nervous and shy and not quite at ease with other people. At that time let them have three years in their own university colleges and then come here on the fellowships, from which I am sure they will benefit greatly.
I am glad, too, that the opportunity is to be given for a limited number of awards to senior scholars of established


reputation and achievement. It will be valuable to have spread about our country more senior scholars like those who have frequently visited and taught in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I am thinking particularly of Dr. Radakrishnan, the Vice-President of India, who occupied a post at Oxford for many years. It will be a great thing if we can give an opportunity for a few more eminent scholars, not necessarily as eminent as he is, to come and study and teach and meet students in other universities of our country.
Paragraph 8 of the report of the Commonwealth Education Conference states:
The main emphasis will be on awards in the academic field but we do not exclude the possibility of some awards to other persons who play important roles in the life of their community.
That is also a valuable provision, because, clearly, there are people in many of the territories of the Commonwealth, which hon. Members on both sides of the House know very well, who have never had the opportunity of higher education and yet who have revealed in their conduct, their character, their activities in administration and politics in their own countries that they have the qualities of mind and ability which would have fitted them if that opportunity had been there. So let them, also, have an opportunity to share in the scheme to some extent.
I hope, too, that when the Commission makes its appointments it will have in mind some awards which will enable students to go to institutions that do not grant degrees. There are some people in early middle age for whom a university education is now impracticable for various reasons, but for whom it would be of great value, both to themselves and to us, to have the opportunity of coming here and studying in colleges such as Ruskin or Fircroft or the Loughborough Co-operative College and others not of university standing, but which are giving a similar education to men of mature age. These have rendered great service in our country and they are now rendering great service in the underdeveloped parts of the Commonwealth.
All the colleges I have mentioned have overseas students. Not long ago I was at Loughborough, where I met 30 or 40 students from overseas countries. They

were excellent men and women, studying seriously and sensibly an important subject, and able to engage with me in a most dispassionate, detailed, reasonable discussion of the political and economic problems of their territories. Although I know that some are here already, it may be that under this scheme we can find others. So I hope that an opportunity can be given now and again for additional students of that type to go to that kind of institution.
I am very glad indeed that we have a guarantee in this document that all we are to provide today will be additional to what we provide already. We provide a great deal, one way and another, to bring overseas students from all the territories of the Commonwealth to study in this country. At the same time, anyone who has had experience of recommending people for such awards must know that so far we have not had sufficient funds, and there are many cases where, although the British Council wished to recommend, or has recommended, a student for such an award because he was fully qualified to receive it and benefit from it and in his turn benefit others, it was unable to find the necessary funds.
I am, therefore, glad that what is now to be provided is a net addition, not in any way a subtraction. I take it that we can understand that in consequence of the passage of the Bill there will not be any reduction in the number of grants and scholarships now provided by colonial development and welfare funds or by the British Council or coming from any other public source in this country?

Mr. Alport: indicated assent.

Mr. Marquand: We want to see Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders coming here and our students going there. We also want to see, as the conference rightly emphasised, special attention being given to
the needs of the economically less developed countries, where educational facilities and opportunities are at present less amply provided.
There are places in the Commonwealth where undergraduate education is not easily available. There are the numerous colleges to which I have referred, such as Madan and Ghana, about which there is a report today of the excellent address


given by the Duke of Edinburgh to the students there. There is also the University College of the West Indies. Equally, however, there are remote territories in which there are able young men and women who, because distances are so great, because their territories are so little developed, have no chance to go even to institutions of that kind abroad.
So we should watch out particularly for territories where local opportunity does not exist, and, if necessary, make an exception to the general rule that these awards are for post-graduate education. I am thinking particularly of the High Commission Territories in Africa. I do not know for certain, and I am willing to be corrected if I am wrong, but I suppose that gifted young men and women from those territories hitherto have had the opportunity to study in the universities of South Africa, particularly in the Witwatersrand and Cape Town. Now, however, if we understand aright, the doors of Witwatersrand and Cape Town will be closed to them.
When I speak of gifted young men and women, I wish to emphasise women, because their opportunities in the underdeveloped countries are for various reasons of tradition, history and culture not as good, roughly speaking, as those of men. Therefore, we should pay particular attention to the nominations of women. These may not be numerous, but they should be considered with that extra sympathy to which their unfortunate situation often entitles them.
A few months ago some of us drew the attention of the Prime Minister of South Africa, in a letter, to our feelings about the proposals contained in the Extension of University Education Bill which recently received a Third Reading in the South African House of Assembly. The letter read as follows:
The signatories of this letter, Members of both Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom, all of whom have held teaching or responsible posts in universities, have read with deep regret of the proposals contained in the Extension of University Education Bill which recently received a third reading in the South African House of Assembly. We understand that this Bill proposes to establish in the Union separate institutions of higher education for Africans, for Asians and for 'coloured' persons and that it would forbid the Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand to admit students from these groups.

Such a proposal strikes at the very root of the conception that a university is universal in its membership, opening its doors to all men and women able to reach high academic standards and, prepared to devote themselves to the pursuit of truth and learning unhampered by fear or prejudice. We earnestly hope that your Government will, after reflection, decide not to proceed further with this Measure.
Some of us on this side of the House signed that letter, but I do not want to quote our names. I should like to remind the House that among the signatories were Lord Birkett, Lord McNair and Lord Halifax himself, who was subsequently chairman of the Commonwealth Education Conference. These are views held with unanimity or almost complete unanimity in this House and in the other place.
I regret very deeply that the only answer we got to this courteously phrased letter, asking the Prime Minister if he would reconsider the Bill, was a brief letter which said that this is an internal matter for the Government of South Africa. We all knew that perfectly well when we sent this letter to him. Every signatory to this letter was well experienced in university affairs and in Government and politics. We knew perfectly well that it was an internal matter for the Union of South Africa. We regret that the response was not a little more understanding.
Ten of the eleven fully self-governing Commonwealth countries which participated in the Education Conference have indicated their intention to participate in this plan, but South Africa has not done so. The hon. Gentleman will interrupt me if there is any news about this, but I do not think that there is, judging from his own speech. I want only to say that, despite everything, we hope that South Africa may still be willing to consider joining the plan so long as she understands that it would be quite contrary to the spirit of the whole plan if there were to be within it any discrimination whatsoever on grounds of race or colour.
I know well that there are men and women in Stellenbosch and Pretoria, just as much as in Cape Town and Witwatersrand, who hold the opinion which I have just expressed. They believe, as we do, in that ideal of the universality of university education and they would be prepared, I think, to


endorse what I have said this afternoon. I still hope that the expression of that ideal may be heard by them and that South Africa may accede on the basis that I have described.

4.24 p.m.

Mr. C. M. Woodhouse: I am very glad that my first opportunity to address the House should be on a subject which, I am sure, from what we have already heard, is largely uncontroversial. That will make it easier for the House to extend to me its customary indulgence if, by any mischance, I should make the subject controversial.
It is also a subject on which it is appropriate that the Member for Oxford should speak, since, as we have already been reminded, the conference which gave rise to the Bill took place in my constituency and the preamble of the report of the conference makes it clear that it took place in Oxford, England—an interesting pointer to the changing way of life in which we live.
The Commonwealth Education Conference covered a great deal more ground than the subject of the Bill. I will return to that in a moment. I do not think that I need say more now than to express appreciation of the fact that this very important conference took place in so appropriate a city and university as Oxford, that great home of causes of the future, and a city that has long enjoyed very intimate connections with the Commonwealth.
The countries of the Commonwealth, and especially the new countries of the Commonwealth, are insatiable consumers of the two most important export products that come from my city—educaton and engineering goods. When the Bill is passed into law, as I am certain it will be, I have no doubt that both our imports and exports will substantially increase. We shall import still more Commonwealth students, because I think that I can say, without presumption, that it is probable that a certain number of them will express preference to come to Oxford if allowed a choice—and very welcome they will be.
If the report of the conference is right—as I am sure it is—in saying that
the improvement of education in itself encourages economic growth",

then we shall certainly, in the long run, increase our exports, too, a prospect to which my constituents in Cowley are already looking forward with confidence.
The Bill is one of those fortunate Measures which ought to make everyone happy, because we are all in favour of the Commonwealth and of education. Whatever else may be controversial, we surely all agree that one of the most vital and enduring links of the Commonwealth is the educational system which we have helped to create in it, together with the English language on which it is based and the common habit of thought which flows from it.
It is not only that English is the common language of practically all the educated classes throughout the Commonwealth, but, also, that it is used as a medium to express and exchange common ideas. "Speaking the same language" is a very expressive metaphor which means much more than that we all talk English. In the Commonwealth we speak the same language, even if we use it sometimes to disagree with each other, in a way that we do not even with other English-speaking peoples in the world
At Commonwealth conferences, which I have more than once had the privilege to attend, when we hear a speaker quoting Shakespeare, or Sherlock Holmes, we are at least as likely to find that he is an African, an Asian, or a West Indian as that he is an Englishman. It is no surprise to see him wearing a tie identifying him with one of the universities of this country or some other British learned institution, such as the Imperial Defence College or the Inns of Court.
This sense of speaking a common language to which all the societies of the Commonwealth contribute, and will increasingly contribute in the future, and in which English is still the essential and natural vehicle, finds its expression at the summit in the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conferences which it would be unthinkable they should ever have to conduct through interpreters. It is an impressive fact today that the Prime Ministers of almost all the newer Commonwealth countries enjoyed at least part of their education at universities or colleges in this country and I take it to be at least part of the purpose of this Bill that that fact should remain a fact. Even more impressive is the fact


that English is still the common language between each of them—Asians, Africans and West Indians—in talking to each other and communicating with their own educated classes, even when an Englishman is not around.
At the beginning of this year, when Dr. Nkrumah and Mr. Nehru met in Delhi, the only common language which they—the Asian and the African—had in which to communicate with each other—and, presumably, in which to grumble about the British Government—was English, and this was so, at least in part, because they had both spent a part of their period of education in this country.
There is cause for pride and satisfaction in these things, but there is, I think, no cause for complacency. It cannot be taken for granted that the English language will continue to enjoy a secure and unchallenged status throughout the vast multi-racial Commonwealth which is coming into being today.
The report of the Commonwealth Education Conference rightly says that it is true that English is the medium of instruction in higher education in most, if not all, of the Commonwealth countries, but it is not the language of instruction for primary education. Primary education has to be done in the vernacular, which means hundreds of different vernaculars, and the vast majority of our fellow-citizens in this great Commonwealth never get anything more than a primary education. The number of its people who communicate in English is a very small minority, and perhaps a dwindling minority.
In several of the newer Commonwealth countries—I have in mind particularly India, Pakistan and Malaya—there are today quite strong nationalist movements which fight to deprive English of its status as an official language. I doubt whether those efforts will be completely successful, because today English is, after all, not merely the language of this country or even that of the Commonwealth, but an international language, and it is the language of science, technology and commerce. However, those movements may succeed in relegating English to the status of no more than a widely spoken second language, as it is today in many European countries.
There are other countries of the Commonwealth today in which English is not even predominant as the language of higher education, and I think that it is not a coincidence that in some cases these are countries with which we have had difficult political relations in the recent past. Cyprus is a sad case in point. In Cyprus, we never succeeded in establishing higher education at all, and we never succeeded in establishing English as the common language between the different communities. In fact, Cyprus might well be taken as an object lesson in the consequences of not having had a Commonwealth Education Conference and not having promoted a Bill of this kind a generation or two ago.
Even in some of the older member States of the Commonwealth English has to compete today with other European languages, even in higher education, such as with French in Canada and with Afrikaans in South Africa, and in the latter case it looks as if English may even now be slowly but steadily losing the competition. The right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) has drawn attention to the fact that the Union of South Africa is the only one of the fully independent members of the Commonwealth which has not committed itself so far to the quota under the new scholarship and fellowship plan. I hope that we may eventually have an assurance that this is purely a coincidence and not a coincidence with any unwelcome significance.
In any case, I do not think that we have any grounds for complacency about English as the language of higher education throughout the Commonwealth in the future. The Oxford conference was, therefore, right to recommend measures to reinforce the standing of English, and the Bill, which, of course, is basically concerned with education in the English language, has come none too soon to serve that purpose. It is an excellent Bill, which deserves the wholehearted support of the House, and if I pass a few detailed comments on some of its provisions and some of the paragraphs in the White Paper which supports it, I hope that it will be understood that my intention is to be constructive and not captious.
I welcome, in the first place, as other hon. Members have done, the intention


set out in the Title, to provide for two levels of appointment—scholarships at the immediately post-graduate level, and also what are called fellowships at a more advanced level for more established scholars. I am sure that these latter fellowships will be found to meet a large, unsatisfied demand. On the contrary, I should be inclined to say from experience that it is often difficult to find people of the quality that one has in mind to fill the gaps which are available for them at the time when one has those gaps, since in these revived times of the wandering scholar it is not in the least difficult nowadays for an academically established reputation to find the means to move around from one country to another, and some of them, indeed, hardly visit their own universities at all.
This is so because of the generous funds which are already provided from private sources, such as the Nuffield Foundation in this country and numerous American foundations in the United States, but since so much of this process of interchange, even within the Commonwealth, is financed today by American charitable funds, grateful though we should be for them, I think that one would welcome any reinforcement of them from British sources for purposes within the Commonwealth.
Secondly, I welcome the provision that careful arrangements should be made for the reception, welfare and residence of students coming into this country. Nothing is more important than the atmosphere, and especially the early impressions, into which a student from overseas finds himself plunged when he first arrives here. We all know—we all constantly say—that we are engaged today in a struggle for men's minds, and a struggle, in particular, for the minds of Ole uncommitted peoples, many hundreds of millions of whom are our fellow-citizens in the Commonwealth. This struggle for men's minds will not be won in such places as the Battle of Waterloo is said, rather oddly, in my view, to have been won. It will be won or lost in the boarding houses of Bloomsbury, Birmingham and other university towns.
I know that the Association of Universities of the Commonwealth and the British Council are very well aware of

this problem, and I should like to pay tribute to the sympathetic attention which they give to it. I hope that the financial provisions of the Bill will enable that attention to be not merely sympathetic, but generous. In this context, I wonder whether the expenditure of an overall sum which works out at only £1,000 per head per annum will be sufficient to do the job we have in mind.
Another provision which I welcome is that it will rest with the receiving countries to make arrangements for placing scholars and fellows in appropriate institutions of learning in this country, though, of course, expressions of preference will be taken into account. I suspect that this Clause will need rather firm interpretation and application, not least in our own country.
We heard a few weeks ago, in the debate on the Marshall Scholarships Bill, that the vast majority of the American students coming under the Marshall scholarships plan to this country expressed a preference for one of three universities—Oxford, Cambridge and London—and in most cases their wishes were met. I have the honour and good fortune to have been associated with all three of those universities, but I also have the privilege to be associated with one of the provincial universities which has not yet seen a single Marshall scholar cross its threshold. The same thing could very easily happen with the present Commonwealth scholarships scheme, and I am sure that that is wrong.
It is wrong for the universities which are excluded, it is wrong for those which get an excessively large quota of overseas students, and it is wrong even for the students themselves, for instead of seeing a wide variety of aspects of British life, they will carry back with them much the same experience. It is a very fine experience, and I should, of course, be the last to deprecate their reasons for putting Oxford at the top of the list, but I know that Sheffield, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Reading Universities have plenty to offer them as well. Nor can it seriously be argued that, at the level of the postgraduate studies that most of these students will be undertaking, it really makes a great deal of difference under which professor they serve, or at which university.
In the debate on the Marshall scholarships, some hon. Members expressed surprise, I remember, at the classical student going to Glasgow instead of to Oxford. I happen to have the best of reasons for knowing that Glasgow University has a formidable classical faculty, because in my day at Oxford at least half of the classical prizes every year were won by invading Scots with classical degrees—greatly to my annoyance.
Broadly speaking, those students who will come to this country under the present plan can get what they want and need at practically any university here, and if exceptions are needed at the more senior level they can easily be made. Nor is it good for Oxford, Cambridge and London to have an excessive concentration of overseas students whilst other universities go short. After all, What students come here for is to share in the life of a predominently British community, not one in which we natives are in danger of being swamped by a cosmopolitan majority. But as, undoubtedly, students will continue, very understandably, to put Oxford at the top of the list, a proper distribution can be achieved only by the exercise of a proper degree of firm direction. I am glad that the Bill confers that power, and I hope that it will be exercised.
Another provision I welcome is that by which married scholars and fellows will be able to be accompanied by their wives at the expense of the scheme—although that makes me wonder even more how it will be done on £1,000 a year. This will widen the experience of both the transmitting and the receiving countries.
I must say, however, that I do not like the apparent discrimination here between the younger scholars and the more senior fellows. It appears from the White Paper that, although the scholars may only have their wives paid for, fellows may have their children paid for, also. By definition, scholars are younger than fellows, and their children, therefore, are likely to be smaller than those of the fellows. Since the fellows are subject to no age limit, their children may well be grown up, or at least past needing baby sitters.
It seems a rather harsh discrimination that young scholars may have to leave their children behind and to organise

baby sitters for them for up to two years or more, whilst the fellows may be granted something for which their need is likely to be relatively less. Families would add much to the experience to be gained under this scheme, and not so very much to the cost, since, as other hon. Members besides myself may have learned by experience, families come cheaper by the half-dozen. It would be a good thing for the Commonwealth that the scholars should be encouraged to bring their children with them, and I hope that this provision may be looked at again.
Another provision to which I would like to add a qualification is what the White Paper calls the obligation to return home. There is an important distinction to be made here. We must face the fact, without false modesty, that this country, and, in particular, our academic institutions, is a uniquely powerful magnet for students from all over the Commonwealth, not to say from all over the world. Many of them come here to finish their studies and then wish to settle here rather than to take their qualifications and skills back to the land of their birth. Those, newly-developed countries are liable to be drained of some of their best talent. In these cases, it seems perfectly right to make a condition of selection that they should return home at least for a specified number of years.
I suggest, however, that the same does not apply in the reverse direction. If students from this country go to Nigeria, Malaya, or the West Indies to complete their studies and wish to stay on to work in the country in which they have taken their post-graduate course, the deprivation suffered by this country will not be commensurate with the gain to the receiving country, and they should not be discouraged from doing so, but warmly encouraged to do so. That, after all, is how the British Empire and Commonwealth came into existence, and it was also the declared object of another section of the report of the Commonwealth Education Conference to encourage teachers, in particular, to serve in Commonwealth countries other than their own. I therefore hope that this rather indiscriminate obligation to return home may also be looked at again.
That leads me to my last point, which concerns the principle of the Bill as a


whole. It seems to me that there is a danger that, while dealing satisfactorily with the easier part of the task that was set before the Commonwealth Education Conference in July, it may allow the more difficult part to go by default. In this context of the scholarship and fellowship plan, the task was to establish a scheme covering 1,000 persons based on a pooling of the resources of the Commonwealth as a whole. The White Paper stresses the fact that
Each has something to learn from the others; each has something to give;
and that the aim is the
… development of a multilateral trade in ideas.
It is the word "multilateral" on which I should like to dwell for a moment, because it does not seem to me accurately to describe the present plan as set out in the Bill. Whether we like it or not, one fact about the Commonwealth is that this country is still, in an important sense, its centre. I need only point out that of the Commonwealth capitals London is the only one that has a Commonwealth Relations Office, and that it is in London that such Commonwealth bodies as the Association of Universities naturally find their seat. Most Commonwealth citizens overseas who are conscious of the Commonwealth link at all—and let us not flatter ourselves; it is only a minority that is conscious of it—think of the Commonwealth primarily as a relationship between their own country, on the one hand, and the United Kingdom, on the other.
The Commonwealth is still largely a system of bilateral relations between this country and the other individual members of the Commonwealth. It is not a complex of multilateral relations between us all. There are exceptions, of course—the relations between Canada and the West Indies, or between Australia and New Zealand, for obvious geographical reasons, or between India and Canada, for reasons of recent history. Generally speaking, however, the diagonal relations between the other member countries of the Commonwealth are either very slight or non-existent—or, unfortunately, downright bad, as they are between India and Pakistan, or between the Union of South Africa, on the one hand, and the Asian

and African members of the Commonwealth, on the other.
I take it that we should all like to see this situation remedied, and I also take it that this was one of the long-term objects of the Commonwealth Education Conference itself, but it will not be the effect of the present Bill. This Measure is expressly concerned with the United Kingdom share of the plan. It deals only with students coming from the different Commonwealth countries in this country and with students going out from this country to other Commonwealth countries.
The Bill does not deal at all with the diagonal exchanges between the other Commonwealth countries themselves. These are to be left to what the report of the Commonwealth Education Conference calls
… a series of bilateral arrangements to allow for the necessary flexibility.
Unfortunately, the word "flexibility" is often a euphemism for doing nothing at all, and I fear that in this case there would be no great natural flow of students from the West Indies to New Zealand, or from Canada to Malaya, of from Ceylon to Ghana, and vice versa, unless something more definite is done to promote it.
This is not because the opportunities do not exist in other universities in the Commonwealth, but because students in the Commonwealth are, generally, not aware of them unless the opportunities are deliberately and expressly brought to their attention. For every one Commonwealth student who has heard of Achimota, or the University College of the West Indies, a dozen will have heard of Oxford, and Oxford is still where they will want to go unless there is some machinery for distributing them on a more multilateral basis.
The Commonwealth Education Conference proposed what I took to be referred to by my right hon. Friend as the Commonwealth education liaison committee, which it described as some additional machinery of an intra-Commonwealth character to assist, as required, bilateral contacts between agencies appointed by Governments—that is, by each Commonwealth Government—within their own countries. It went on expressly to exclude the scholarship and fellowship plan from


that machinery. It did so on the ground that the scholarship and fellowship plan was to have a special arrangement of its own.
It turns out, on examination, that the function of the special arrangement exclusive to the scholarship and fellowship plan will only be for recording information about awards made under the plan and the preparation of an annual statement of progress. As I understand it, it has no function of initiation, or direction, or even of giving advice.
There is a gap there which will be felt in practice. If there is to be a multilateral system of exchange and not merely a collection of bilateral exchanges between this country and the rest of the Commonwealth, some degree of co-ordination is needed on a central basis for the whole Commonwealth. If the initiative to create it does not come from this country. I fear that it will not come about at all.
I hope that I shall not be thought to be speaking from the wrong side of the House if I say again that what is needed is a reasonable and fair measure—perhaps I should say a conservative measure—of central direction and planning.
With those few suggestions and reservations I wholeheartedly support the Bill, which, I am sure, will commend itself to the House.

4.52 p.m.

Mr. John Dugdale: It is a very great privilege to congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) on what I think we all agree was a remarkable speech. It was a speech with knowledge, and fluency, and it was also entertaining. It is very rarely that we hear a speech of that excellence delivered the first time an hon. Member speaks, or, indeed, at any time by many of us here. We were all glad to hear the hon. Member. He said that he was glad to be speaking in a non-controversial debate. We will be interested to hear him speak when he gets onto something controversial. I have no doubt that he will entertain us equally well.
I would like to refer to one or two remarks made by the hon. Gentleman. He referred to the question of which

university somebody coming from the Commonwealth should go to. That is a point which exercises the minds of many of us. I feel privileged at having been what I might perhaps call a constituent of the hon. Gentleman's for three years of my life. If I am not strictly correct in saying that I was a constituent, I was at any rate a visitor to what is now his constituency, and I know that many people from the Commonwealth want to go either there or to Cambridge.
I had an interesting case of a young Pakistani who wanted to go to Cambridge. He could not get there or to Oxford, so instead of going to one of the other universities in England he decided to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are many people like that, who have heard of Oxford and Cambridge, and possibly Edinburgh, but very few other universities. They do not realise the excellent standards of education which they can receive in other universities. I hope that something can be done to emphasise that fact.
At the same time, I hope that something can be done, and it will have to be done if the scheme proposed in the Bill is brought in, to increase the total number of places in all our universities. If that is not done there will not be enough places to house all these people, and we all hope that this is the beginning of a much bigger scheme.
One can study various subjects in our universities, but I was surprised by the case I heard of the other day. A young lady from America was studying at Edinburgh University. Strange to relate, she was studying American history. It struck me as very odd that she had come all the way from America to Edinburgh to study American history, but that is what she had done.
Before referring to some of the points in the Bill, I would like, as the Minister did, to refer to the whole scheme which has been devised, which includes teacher training. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned that, because it enables me to say how much I hope that the scheme will succeed. I want to add a word for a class of teachers which, I hope, will get its share of vacancies. I am referring to the teachers of the handicapped, in particular, the blind and the deaf. I hope that something will be done to see that those teachers get their


share of places, and that the vacancies will not be given only to scientists and technicians. The teachers to whom I have just referred must have facilities for learning how to deal with these pupils who present very great difficulties.
Having said that, I welcome the Bill and am delighted that for once we can have a bipartisan debate, if debate it can be called under the circumstances.
There is one danger which the Commonwealth faces today. It is not the danger that comes from outside, from the Communists, or from the Soviet Union. It is that the whole Commonwealth idea can be smothered in a lot of hot air. So much hot air is talked about it that it is good to see a down-to-earth practical proposal for bringing about something in the Commonwealth which did not exist before, and something which makes the Commonwealth links closer than they were before.
I am glad that this is to be a system of mutual aid. If I may say so without being controversial, or, at any rate, not more controversial than the hon. Member for Oxford, the scheme is an example of Socialism, because we say, "From each according to his ability, and to each according to his needs." I gather that that is the principle which is being carried out in the Bill.
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand), I am interested not so much in what we give as in what we receive. I hope that many of our students will avail themselves of the opportunity of going to Commonwealth countries, not only to Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Ghana. I hope that there will be a two-way traffic so that our students can go to universities in those countries and study there in the same way as people are coming to our universities.
I would like to ask the Minister one or two questions. I do so in no spirit of antagonism, but because I do not understand the position. My questions are about colonial students. I am sorry to see that there is not a representative of the Colonial Office here. I should have thought that there would have been, but as there is not I will address my questions to the right hon. Gentleman.
I understand that we in this country will be responsible for colonial students and that the Commission will both nominate colonial students and select them for United Kingdom awards. I may be wrong, but that is what it looks like to me. At the same time, it will also select both colonial as well as United Kingdom candidates for awards by Commonwealth Governments. I do not know whether that is so. Nor do I know whether the quota of students that we can take here or recommended for scholarship in other Commonwealth countries will include those from the Colonies. It is important to get those facts clear.
I would like the hon. Gentleman to say something more about supervision. I agree with the hon. Member for Oxford about the problem of students who come to this country and find that although they get a good education they get nothing else besides. They sit in lodging houses beside gas fires and wonder whether they have come all the way here to lead that kind of life. There are many good lodging house keepers, and many good places where these students can live, but it is important to see that the standards of accommodation are as high as the standards of education that they will receive. If we do not do that the scheme will prove a failure.
Again, I do not understand the principle of selection. I realise that it will have to be done by the Commission and not the Government, but upon what principle are candidates to be selected? Is it purely on merit, or will the chosen subjects influence the decision? Perhaps I can take an extreme case. If it is done on merit there may be 99 scientists and one historian selected. How will it be done? It is difficult to judge between a candidate who wants to take science and one who wants to take history. We ought to have some more information about this matter, or we shall not have a clear understanding of what is involved in the work of the Commission.
I pay tribute to all those who have helped to build up this scheme, including members of the Government. It is not often that we have the privilege of paying tribute to members of the Government, but in this case they have done their job well. I cannot imagine that


they would do many other jobs as well, but at any rate they have done this one well, and that is something upon which we can all congratulate them.
The scheme is imaginative and practical. It will do more for the Commonwealth than all the speeches of most of the great statesmen, from day to day and year to year. It is an example of what the Commonwealth can do—an example which no other country or group of nations has been able to do. While we watch the French having their difficulties in North Africa and the Belgians and other people having similar difficulties, it is good to see emerging, in the Commonwealth, a bright picture of countries who are now entirely free agreeing among themselves to co-operate for their own mutual advantage.
In that spirit we can all welcome the Bill and hope that the Minister, or his successor—and not too many years from now—will ask the House for more money for more scholarships. When he does so, I am certain that he will get what he wants.

5.1 p.m.

Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd: I rise for a few moments not only to support the Bill but to express my enthusiasm for it. First, I would join with the right hon. Member for West Bromwich (Mr. Dugdale) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). It is most appropriate that he, as Member for Oxford, should make such a speech, which was at once so scholarly and so effective.
I thought my hon. Friend did extremely well to dwell upon the important question of sustaining a proper knowledge of English in the Commonwealth. When I was in India, recently, I saw the difficulties that can arise upon this question—although, as he said, powerful forces are still working on our side—because when I was in the Lower House of the Indian Parliament I heard the Speaker rebuke members for speaking too much Hindi and interfering with the comprehension of other members.
My hon. Friend was very right to stress the importance of properly looking after Commonwealth students in this country. I know that a great deal is being done, but we should raise our

voices to encourage everybody to do more about this vitally important question, which may affect the whole outlook, in their later lives, of men who spend some time here before going home.
I should like to pinpoint the course of events leading up to the present situation. It will be remembered that it was Canada who first made an effort in this direction, at the Commonwealth Economic Conference. We were very fortunate in that, at that Conference, my right hon. Friend the then President of the Board of Trade, who is now Minister of Education, was present. My right hon. Friend had already previously held the office of Minister of Education, and because of his knowledge of the subject and his keenness for the development of education he was able to appreciate at once the crucial importance of Canada's suggestion. He was instrumental in making the matter one of the main issues at the Conference. So it came about that the Canadian suggestion was matched by a generous United Kingdom offer.
So we had the Commonwealth Education Conference, which was created primarily to develop the practical application of the scholarship scheme, but is also—because of my right hon. Friend's intervention—to review the whole question of Commonwealth education. At this conference, a very interesting thing happened. It was the younger Commonwealth countries which made the running. The line they took was that, although they welcomed the scholarship scheme, they wanted something else as well. They said that the scholarship scheme dealt with the apex of the educational system, but they were also vitally concerned with the foundations, that is, the schools below the levels of the universities and colleges of advanced technology. Thus it comes about that today we are considering not merely a scholarship scheme but a scheme which plans for the development of a whole range of educational work, right from primary schools to universities and colleges of advanced technology.
One very interesting point about the project is that so far it has gathered momentum at every stage of its development, from the very beginning. That is why I regard this debate as so important. It is most important that we should


not merely pass the Bill but do so with enthusiasm, and let the Government and other Commonwealth countries know that the House of Commons wants to give a vigorous push forward to this fine project. If we pass the Bill we pass the ball back to the Government.
I would make one or two small practical suggestions I am glad that there will be a liaison committee to watch the development of the plan on a Commonwealth basis, but we shall have to strengthen our own administrative arrangements at home in order to help the scheme forward. The education departments of the Colonial Office and of the Commonwealth Relations Office will have to be enlarged and strengthened, and work in close liaison with the Ministry of Education.
Then there is the question of educational attachés. The House may not know that our only educational attaché in a mission overseas is in the United States. When I was there on an educational tour earlier this year, I realised the profound importance of this post. American educationists were able to get at once information about the work being done here in a way which would never have been possible unless there had been somebody there—in this case one of the ablest of the schools inspectors—who was fully competent to provide the information, or to obtain it from this country. We should consider appointing educational attachés to the offices of our High Commissioners, and especially those in the younger Commonwealth countries.
I am very glad to hear that there will be a follow-up conference in India in 1961. The last conference was a conference of professional educationists, and it has done marvellous work, but the next conference should consider very seriously bringing Ministers of Education into the picture. I appreciate the difficulties. In some countries, such as Canada, education is a provincial subject, but I think that we can get over that difficulty.
One of the reasons why it is important to do this brings me to my next point, which is also of great importance. We must seek to create an entirely new climate of opinion upon the whole question of Commonwealth education. There is always a danger that when any educational subject arises general public

opinion regards is at a matter for specialists. This is not a narrow professional subject; it is no exaggeration to say that it is a subject which goes to the heart of the problems of the free world in the future. It is significant that it did not grow out of the Commonwealth Educational Conference but out of an Imperial Economic Conference.
I do not know whether hon. Members heard the very interesting speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton (Mr. Head) in the debate on the Address, when he called for a master plan for the development of the free world and, among many other things, stressed the great importance of education although he is not an educationist. He pointed out that in fact a great deal of the financial assistance which we might make available in future may be wasted unless there are sufficient educated and trained people in the countries which we seek to help. We ought to note that other countries are moving fast in this matter.
When I was Minister of Education, I paid particular attention to what was going on in Russia. I will not weary the House with a great deal of detail, but I found one thing interesting. Some of our leaders of the colleges of advanced technology have made some adventurous trips in Russia, penetrating to the far Asian Republics of the Soviet Union, and I have heard interesting accounts of what they saw. In addition to accounts of the great development of education and of the great technical colleges, in far Russia as well as in the nearer regions of Russia, there was one thing that struck them very much. It was the tremendous amount of foreign language teaching incorporated into the curriculum of the technical colleges, the implication being that the Soviet Union is deliberately engaged in preparing for an amount of assistance going far outside its own borders.
On the other hand, when I was on an educational tour in the United States, I found at almost every university and college I visited that one group after another of the great American foundations was sending educational missions out to Africa. I know that we are in favour of our American Allies helping in this great work. But I know also that the House would wish to see that we match that, particularly in the Common-


wealth, by a worthy effort of our own. I do not seek, and I am sure that other hon. Members will not, to make the case for this effort simply on what other people are doing. We want to do this because it is right. This is a matter in which there is a real outlet in the future for the idealism of our people.
The House will agree that in the years since the war there has never been such buoyancy and vitality in British education as there is at present, following the great Education Act. This is an extraordinary opportunity, because just at the time when these Commonwealth countries need help from us so badly we are in a position to offer more help, and help of a higher quality, than we have ever been able to offer before, because our standards of education are so highly regarded in the world. Therefore, I conclude by saying that I think the House is showing in this debate what I believe it is very important that we should show, a willingness to give this Bill a really enthusiastic send-off. We should make a plea to the Press and to the great broadcasting organisations to give the prominence to the question of Commonwealth education which it really deserves and to help to promote the enthusiasm of our people in the future of this great enterprise.

5.13 p.m.

Mr. Malcolm MacPherson: I find myself almost entirely in agreement with the points made by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. G. Lloyd). I can say the same about the points made in the most excellent maiden speech by the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). It is rare that I find myself in such complete agreement with views expressed by hon. Members opposite.
I was particularly glad that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned the initiative of Canada in this connection. He might even have said that the initiative came largely from the mind of one Canadian, the late Sidney Smith, who was President of the University of Toronto and then Minister for External Affairs. It is well that we should remember that, even in a major Commonwealth-embracing scheme like this, the initiative of one statesmanlike mind in the Commonwealth can still have its influence.
I join in the welcome which the Bill has received. It seems to me an extremely important Measure. It appears to represent a worthy effort on our part as a contribution to the combined Commonwealth effort in which we are engaged. It is particularly important that it should be initiated just now because of the interest in education in the newer members of the Commonwealth and in the Dependent Territories. It is difficult to over-estimate that interest. There appears to be an insatiable demand for education in the under-developed parts of the Commonwealth, if I may use that phrase. It is just as well that we are trying to do something about that at this time.
This demand is to be seen in the considerable increase which has taken place since the war in the numbers of Commonwealth students in this country in any case, under other schemes or under no scheme. It may be seen in the building up of the newer university institutions in the Commonwealth, which is likely to go on with increasing momentum. In future years, we may well find ourselves producing Bills to augment what we are doing now. I hope that we shall look on this Bill as the beginning of something rather than the completion.
We are breaking new ground with this Bill, because stress is laid on the co-operative nature of the effort which we are making. So far in the history of the Commonwealth there has been a tendency, which was more or less inevitable, for this country to do the planning, to work out the way ahead, to suggest means, and that kind of thing. But now we are deliberately saying that we will do our share but that other parts of the Commonwealth are perfectly able to do their share, which we shall welcome.
It seems to me important not only from the purely educational side but also from the point of view of the Commonwealth itself. In the last decade or two, we have seen the constitutional links binding the Commonwealth gradually weaken; indeed, most of them have disappeared. It is difficult to say what, constitutionally, holds the Commonwealth together. But here is something which is a link inside the Commonwealth. It is not constitutional, it cannot be described by the lawyers as the old links were, but it is a real and binding


factor in the Commonwealth. If we all co-operate and engage in tackling the problem in this way, we may find that we are building up links within the Commonwealth which will prove stronger than ever.
Our offer of 500 places is a generous one. I do not think we could have done very much more than that as a beginning. But having said that, I suggest that in relation to the need it is still a comparatively small offer. After all, the people who are co-operating in this Bill represent a quarter of the population of the world, 650 million or thereabouts, and we are offering 500 scholarships.
Against the existing number of Commonwealth students in this country, about 27,000, we are offering 500. In comparison with the Colombo Plan—I have not been able to verify my figures about this—I think we are welcoming, roughly, 300 students every year, whereas under this plan we are to welcome 200 to 250, dependent on the strictness with which the two-year length of course is applied. Whilst it is a noble, generous and worthy beginning, it is only a very small step forward compared with the huge problem.
Universities, although the bases of this, should not be necessarily the only element in it. The White Paper mentions colleges of advanced technology. I hope that they will have a representative on the Commission. I hope that industry and commerce will be brought very strongly into this, because much of what we can be doing as our share in the co-operative effort is training young men from other parts of the Commonwealth in industry and commerce. That cannot now be done simply in classrooms. I hope that it will be possible, for example, for young men and women to take part in sandwich courses and undergo periods of training in industry.
I do not like the statement in the White Paper that the average length of stay in this country will be 22 months, or two academic years. That means cutting out one summer vacation. A student under the plan who finds it possible to stay over an additional summer vacation and take training inside industry or commerce should be welcomed. The phrase "22 months" was not, I hope, used in any very strict sense.
I hope that the scheme to which the scholarships will be applied will be very wide and will, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) suggested, go beyond the confines of universities and even colleges of advanced technology. The Fulbright scheme already in existence covers an extremely wide range of institutions—musical, architectural and many others. I hope that the scope of this scheme will be as wide as that. I hope, also, that there will be an increasing emphasis on the importance of non-academics. As my right hon. Friend said, there are a great number of people who have not had the chance of an academic career who could benefit themselves and the Commonwealth very much by coming here to study under the scheme.
As the right hon. Gentleman said, the scheme emerges from an economic conference. It is as well that we should realise that education is an economic asset. In generations before the war we were inclined to think of it in purely cultural terms, but it has a very strong economic value, although that is not by any means its whole value In speaking of the economic side of the venture, we should stress economic interests rather more fully than the Government have so far in the Minister's statement and the White Paper been prepared to do.
I recall, rather vaguely, that a number of years ago Professor Arthur Lewis made a statement about the importance of trading in agriculture. I have not been able to trace his statement since. He talked about the importance of training three or four hundred million small farmers in modern methods of agriculture. Agriculture perhaps does not come as the first thought to people talking in the heart of London, in Birmingham or in Oxford, but it is still the major activity of a very large part of the world. We should consider how far we can go in assisting in agricultural education.
In this country we have a very definite and well understood, though diverse, system of university education. It is based on a fairly well accepted philosophy. One has a fair notion of what one expects a university to do, what its main interests should be, what it actually is and what sort of standards it should reach. But we have not got


that in technical education. We have been able to export our philosophy in university education. I hope that we will not insist that it is the only right philosophy, but we have exported that philosophy with great advantage. We have not had, and still do not have, a corresponding philosophy of technical education to export.
It is in this respect that we may most benefit from the experience of other parts of the Commonwealth in working out that sort of philosophy. In this part of education we are nearer the same starting line as countries like India, Ghana and even Canada. Canada is in the same boat as we are. She has strong and flourishing universities, but in technical education she has not the same strength of philosophy. It may well be that we should stress the desirability of building up a common experience and working out a common philosophy in the Commonwealth. The exporting of our own ideas of university education has from time to time been somewhat of a handicap, but we need not be handicapped by that in technical education.
There springs to my mind a very illuminating and relevant remark made a year or two ago by Mr. Walter Adams, who is now principal of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Speaking about university education in the Dependencies he said then—I do not think that it is out of date now—that there was a great need for the same kind of survey of the needs of higher post-secondary education on the technical side as we have been carrying out through the Asquith Commission and similar succeeding Commissions on the university side. That is probably still true. I think that we might well co-operate in doing something of that sort as a basis for some of the work in this scheme.
I hope that the Minister will say a little more about our share in outward traffic. We are inclined to concentrate on what we can do for the people coming to this country, but some of our people will be going to other parts of the Commonwealth. How many? We offer 500 scholarships. Will we take 500 places elsewhere or will there be some multilateralism about it? Will the 500 places that we might possibly claim be taken in greater proportions by other parts of

the Commonwealth? Will we content ourselves with a smaller share of the outward movement than that?
I hope that we shall not only send people to the universities in the newer territories. I hope that we shall send some students to places like the Royal Technical College of Nairobi and the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology. I hope that the Minister who winds up will give us some additional information about the composition of our outgoing traffic in the plan.
I turn now to deal with one or two topics connected with the administration of the plan. As my right hon. Friend said, the 500 places we are offering in our universities will be additional to the existing places going to overseas students. What about our own students? The number of places in our universities at present is far too limited and we are already turning away properly qualified students.
The Scottish universities which have for centuries not turned away a properly qualified student are now, not only in science and medicine but also in arts subjects, refusing students who are properly qualified. In such a situation, can we be assured that there are going to be 500 additional places? Is there not some danger that it is going to mean that there will be the same number of places as there would have been but that 500 overseas students will fill those places instead of our own students? Even if that happens, I would still be in favour of the scheme, in spite of the Scottish tradition in finding university places for students who are capable of filling them.
I should be prepared to defend that situation in Scotland because I think it is enormously important, but I should like to know the Government's position in the matter. Are they really places which have got to be available apart from this scheme or will it mean a displacement of our own students? My anxiety on the point is deepened by an article by the Minister, Lord Home, in a recent issue of the Scotsman. The article pointed out that when foreign students come in they "squeeze out" our own students. Lord Home did not say that this would be avoided, or anything to that effect.
It looks to me, therefore, as if we shall find ourselves giving up places which our own people might well have occupied. That suggests two things to me. One is that we are not expanding our universities fast enough. The other is that, if we exclude some of our own domestic students, I hope that the Government are going to do a little explaining on this subject to the public. I hope the Government are not going to say that it is purely a matter of our universities and that they do not propose to explain to the country what is going to happen to the places and who are to be the people selected to fill them. I hope that the Government will make themselves responsible for giving some information to the public.
One other point I wish to make concerns the administration of the scheme. I hope that its administration is going to be constructive. It is quite remarkable how many schemes of this sort are now in existence. The senior of them all, of course, is the Rhodes Scholarship scheme. There are the Commonwealth Fund Scholarships, the Athlone Scholarships, the Marshall Scholarships, the Fulbright Scholarships and others.
The universities and the Colombo Plan are under the Treasury. The two Ministries concerned in this plan are those of Colonies and Commonwealth Relations. The colleges of advanced technology and a number of other institutions are under the Ministry of Education. One begins to wonder whether there is not a case for looking at the question of rationalising the whole matter. I say that particularly because a lot of the experience is common experience. In the first two or three years of this scheme a lot of teething troubles could be avoided by our looking at the experience of other schemes.
I was very glad that the hon. Member for Oxford raised the question of the wives and families of Commonwealth students. After all, the upper age of the preferred age group is 28. At 28 years of age a great number of people have young families. If the Minister will look at the experience of Fulbright students, he will find that when they come to this country with wives and children the children are very largely a key to obtaining some of the value of living in this country and in the university communities of this country. I hope that the Minister is

going to say that students will be provided with whatever expenditure is needed for their wives and families irrespective of whether they are senior scholars or at the first post-graduate stage.
These are some of the points that come to my mind when looking at this scheme, and if any of my observations seem critical I hope they will be taken against the background that my reaction to the scheme is very strongly one of approval. I hope the scheme will succeed and that the Government will continue to treat it with the same sense of urgency with which it seems to have been treated so far and that it will be something which will grow with the years.

5.35 p.m.

Mr. Bryant Godman Irvine: There are two reasons why I am particularly pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stirling and Falkirk Burghs (Mr. Malcolm MacPherson). The first is that I happened to read in a Canadian newspaper the other day a report of the result of our recent General Election. I am happy to be able to tell the hon. Gentleman that Canadians still take a kindly interest in his welfare as a result of his former association with their country.
The second reason is that the hon. Gentleman referred to the fact that some of the speakers who had been called earlier in the debate were not predominantly Members representing agricultural constituencies and, therefore, might not have the needs of agriculture in the forefront of their minds. I happen to come from an agricultural constituency and I have been waiting to raise this point about agriculture. I welcome the hon. Gentleman's co-operation in that matter. Agriculture seems to me to be one of the most important matters for the Commonwealth. If as a result of this scheme we are able to increase the amount of agricultural technical knowledge and experience, we may be able to make an important contribution to one of the greatest problems with which the Commonwealth is faced.
We can find an answer to the problem of hunger and related difficulties by increasing agricultural production and by spreading agricultural knowledge. Anything that the Bill does in that way will be a major contribution to the strength and prosperity of the Commonwealth.
I noticed that the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) hoped that as a result of this Bill we should see students from this country going to Australia and New Zealand and their students coming here. That is exactly what other speakers have hoped and what I hope will be the result of the Bill.
I have in the back of my mind the way in which Rhodes scholars have made important contributions to the academic life of this country. The universities here would be much poorer if they had not the benefit of the valuable acquisition of talent from different parts of the Commonwealth as a result of these scholarships.
At the same time, when I look at the White Paper, I wonder whether, in fact, that is all we are to see. Clause 1 (1, c) states that the Commission shall be charged with the duty of—
selecting persons to be put forward as candidates from the United Kingdom for awards arising out of the said Plan and to be granted in countries outside the United Kingdom.
I would have hoped, therefore, that would mean people in this country would be selected to study at universities in different parts of the Commonwealth. When we look at the Report of the Commonwealth Education Conference, we find that it limits Commonwealth scholarships to a very small number of students. The students directly referred to are those
at the undergraduate level only when university or comparable institutions are nonexistent in the sending country.
If that is the way in which the scheme is to be administered, the number of people in this country who will be able to take advantage of courses in Australia and elsewhere will be very limited. Therefore, I would like the Parliamentary Secretary to give us some information on this point. If that is what, in fact, it means, I hope that at some stage we shall be able to widen the scope of the plan to cover exactly the type of case which the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East and others seem to have in mind.
I will illustrate what I have in mind by referring, in particular, to certain problems which arise in Canada. There have been difficulties in the way of stu-

dents from this country going to study in Canadian universities, and they have been tackled, for very nearly thirty years now, by the Canadian British Education Committee, of which Mr. Hemming, who is well known on both sides of the Atlantic, is the chairman. That started by a party of sixteen headmasters, with Sir Cyril Norwood as chairman, visiting Canada to find out how it might be possible to arrange for more students from this country to go to Canadian universities.
I will not set out all the difficulties. I had, however, hoped that, as a result of the Bill, it might have been possible for us to overcome at least some of them. The first is that there are very few scholarships available to people in this country who would like to study in a Canadian university. There are a few provided by one or two institutions and a group of private individuals. The Goldsmiths Company has a scheme, and the Drapers Company has something in mind. The Beaverbrook Foundation makes awards of this nature and there is also a small body of private individuals, less than a dozen, who have put up private funds to finance this type of operation.
In this country, out of the 23,367 people we had at universities in the year 1958–59, 84 per cent. were receiving scholarships. Therefore, there is not an incentive for all those in the 84 per cent. to go and find a place in a Canadian university where there is no scholarship available for them. This means that the people who are interested in going to a Canadian university are limited, perhaps, to the remaining 16 per cent. who are unfortunate in not receiving a scholarship at home and, also, to those who happen to have parents in a sufficiently strong financial position to be able to pay the fare to Canada and cover the cost of education there.
That is a type of problem which I hoped would have been dealt with by the Bill. I hope at some stage, if the plan is not at present wide enough, we shall arrange for just what the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East wanted and what, I am sure, a great many right hon. and hon. Members would like to see, namely, British students at undergraduate level being able to go and take courses in Canada, Australia, New


Zealand and elsewhere. If that is not what we are debating today, then I hope that it will be something which we shall debate in the very near future.
The other difficulty in having students go from this country to universities in Canada has been a financial one. Dollars were not readily available for the purpose. Negotiations took place, and the Treasury made dollars available and increased the amounts on three different occasions. Now, of course, that problem has gone.
In paragraph 6 of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, Cmnd. 894, it is said that the Commission will have the opportunity, in certain circumstances, of making
the grant of allowances to supplement awards offered to United Kingdom citizens by other countries of the Commonwealth.
In Canada, as I have already said, this would not apply because there are virtually no awards. There again, it seems to me that we have our minds concentrating, perhaps, on countries where there are not university facilities and, much as I welcome everything which is proposed in the Bill to deal with that type of problem, I hope we shall not forget that there are other countries with universities where it would be of great benefit to them to have our students just as it would be of benefit to our students to be able to go there.
There are twenty-five universities in Canada, of which twelve have over 1,500 students. There are 50,000 students working full time in these universities. I hope that, in the not far distant future, either under this scheme or in some other way, it will be possible to distribute about twenty scholarships between those twelve larger universities so that there would be a constant flow of people from this country to avail themselves of the education facilities of Canada.
We often hear about the impact made by broadcasting and constant travel between the United States and Canada. In addition, many undergraduates go from the United States to one of the Canadian universities. It may be that, if we could send one or two of our own undergraduates to those universities in each year, they would do a great deal more to explain the way of life of this country and the Canadian way of life to us in this country than anything which can be

done by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
I hope that, as a result of the Bill, there will not be even fewer students going to Canadian universities than there have been in the past. There is just a possibility that that might occur. I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will be able to assure me that my fears on that score are groundless.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. G. Lloyd), the former Minister of Education, has already referred to the fact that in Canada education is a provincial problem as a result of the British North America Acts and, therefore, finance for education in Canada is not quite so easy to arrange as when it is a Federal responsibility. There have been negotiations with the Canadian Federal authorities, on various occasions, to see whether they could help in this particular problem. There were certain encouraging features in those discussions, but when we come to assess the results of the Education Conference in Montreal, we find that the very generous offers which had been made by the Canadians might mean that there would not be any further possibility of finance to help in the particular difficulties to which I have referred. Therefore, if we wish to find ways of arranging for British students to go to Canadian universities, I hope that this will be made easier under the Bill.
I hope that we shall hear from the Parliamentary Secretary that my fears are groundless and that what the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East and what most other speakers in the debate so far have looked for will be achieved. I sincerely hope that that will be the result.

5.48 p.m.

Mr. Hector Hughes: This is one of the rare occasions on which I find myself in agreement with some of the speakers on the other side of the House, notably the Minister and also the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. G. Lloyd), the previous Minister, who spoke a little earlier. I say that because I should not like it to be thought that my intervention a little earlier during the Minister's speech was in any way hostile to the Bill or to the idea upon which it is based. Quite the contrary. I strongly approve of the Bill.


In my view, it takes an important place in the constitutional and cultural development of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The Bill and the various conferences which preceded it are part of an impressive panorama which is of lifelong interest to me. If I may be permitted a personal reference—I apologise for making it—I wrote a book on Commonwealth development, shortly before the famous Statute of Westminster, which contained progressive ideas of this kind which were then approved by the various constituent parts of the Commonwealth concerned in this Bill. Therefore, it cannot be suggested that I am in any way hostile to the idea of this Bill.
This Bill, as I say, is part of a panorama of Commonwealth development. In earlier days, different from these days, the Colonies looked to Britain, the Mother Country, for help with their population, defence, industries and education, but the tide turned. It is long since the tide turned and those Colonies, now independent realms, have developed all requisite necessities and luxuries for themselves, one of which is education. This Bill is a welcome instance of that turn of the tide and that development of the Commonwealth. One hundred years ago this Bill and the progress it represents would have been impracticable. Now it is an essential development in our constitutional evolution.
This is shown in three important ways, firstly, by the change of direction in the flow of migration, secondly, by the increased strength of our aggregation of nations and, thirdly, by their increased and joint attention to the importance of world-wide education. In the nineteenth century when our Colonies were weak and our Dominions, as they then were, few the net flow of migration was markedly outward to our Colonies which then needed our help. Then 25 million people born in Britain went abroad to settle in those Colonies and build them up. This they have done with great success. In the educational field this Bill is a measure of that success. During the last 80 years, happily, a different flow began, and during those later years large numbers of Europeans, mainly Russians,

Poles. Germans and Hungarians, have helped to diversify the population of our composite island which Shakespeare called.
… that white fac'd shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders.
The world does not give sufficient credit to Britain's magnificent services to human progress by her acceptance and absorption of refugees from other lands. It is they who have made the composite population which is the glory of Britain today and part of the strength of the Commonwealth.
The outward trend changed. It is worth mentioning that from 1871 to 1931 our net loss in Britain was about 3½ million people, but from 1931 to 1955 our net gain in Britain was about ½ million. According to official sources
This net gain was the balance of a large outward movement mainly of British subjects emigrating, mostly since 1945 to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and a large inward movement mainly of aliens from Europe, many of whom were refugees seeking sanctuary in Britain.
There is a time when it is fitting for us notionally to take our stand on a little hill and survey our country in which we live and our Commonwealth in which we live and realise what is its glory, its freedom and its activities which have attracted people from many lands and made it one of the strongest forces for culture and peace in the world.
As I said, this Bill marks a great change. In those earlier days when the Colonies were dependencies, the arrangements envisaged by this Bill would have been inappropriate, perhaps impossible, certainly impracticable, but today the independent realms with their own great actualities and potentialities in science, industry and wealth of every kind make this new vision not only possible but practicable.
This Bill is one of a series of steps which marks progress from an Empire of dependent Colonies to the Commonwealth of independent and interdependent realms of planetary influence and beneficence. Those steps were appropriate, gradual and commonsense according to our unfolding history. In April, 1958, the relevant problems were referred to by Question and Answer in this House. In September, 1958, the


Commonwealth Trade and Economic Conference in Montreal carried their solution a step further when Commonwealth Ministers decided upon a new plan for 1,000 Commonwealth scholarships and fellowships. This 1,000 is too few; I should like to see this number increased. I should like to see the scope of the plan greatly widened and the amount of money available for its implementation greatly increased.
In July, 1959, the solution was carried farther still at the British Commonwealth Education Conference in Oxford when agreement was reached on the scheme embodied in the White Paper now before us. I venture to quote briefly from that White Paper. It says:
The fundamental importance of this Conference is that the Governments of the Commonwealth, in setting it up, have explicitly recognised the need to share their resources in this enterprise on a Commonwealth basis. The truth is that each country of the Commonwealth will be the richer and the more able to shoulder its responsibilities, not only towards its own people, but also to the world, if more of its abler citizens can share in the educational resources available throughout the Commonwealth.
This Bill is designed to implement that idea, but in my submission the number of students who would benefit should be much more than 1,000. Having regard to the vastness of the Commonwealth, the vastness of its population and the vastness of its resources, I submit that 1,000 students is far too small a number to be considered in this way. They should be very much larger in numbers. Correlatively, the amount of money available for the larger studentships and scholarships should be greatly enlarged.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stirling and Falkirk Burghs (Mr. Malcolm MacPherson) said he hoped that this was only a beginning. I hope it is only a beginning. There is another feature to which I am not sure whether my hon. Friend referred when speaking of the various universities. It would be very important to have some information as to how studentships are to be allocated between the three countries in these little islands, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. As I have mentioned Ireland, if this scheme were developed as it should be, it would be fair to extend its benefits to those countries which, though not actually within the Commonwealth, are closely associated with it, such as the

Republic of Ireland. I make a plea for the Republic of Ireland and I hope that if there is a further conference about these very important matters the Minister will consider inviting the Republic of Ireland to send delegates.
I hope that the Bill is only a beginning and that it will be greatly extended. I am very glad that it has come before the House. I hope, too, that it will go through its stages expeditiously and serve our great Commonwealth as well as it should.

6.0 p.m.

Miss Joan Vickers: I am very glad to have the opportunity of saying a few words about the Bill, not because I am an educationist, but because I have had the opportunity of working in Colonial Territories, particularly Malaya when it was a Colony.
The Minister is to be congratulated on bringing in the Bill so quickly after the Oxford conference. There must be something in the air at Oxford which makes it very invigorating. We have had an invigorating speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) and this augurs very well for the future of the scholarship scheme.
As has been said, this is an extremely good way of cementing understanding between peoples. When I was working in Malaya I was responsible for the practical training of students who were to come to England, and I found that the knowledge which they gained from going to England on an interchange with students sent out to Malaya was very helpful. I hope that we shall not have the need to have books like "The Angry American", which I hope all hon. Members will read, to show what should not happen when we try to help overseas countries. The scholarship scheme is a good way of obviating this kind of situation.
Women from Colonial Territories were not present at the Oxford conference. I believe that there were four women from this country, one from Pakistan and one from Canada. I understand that those present commented that it was a great pity that women from the Colonies were not better represented. When my right hon. Friend nominates the members of


the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, I hope that he will be kind enough to include at least one woman, or perhaps two, and certainly one or two among the 40 consultants who are to advise the Commission, as it is essential that far more education for women should be provided.
Last night I went to a students' party. Of all the students there, only two were women students, although some of the students had brought their wives. One has to remember that the majority of students coming from overseas are married and that they will go home to wives who have been living a completely different life from that which the students have experienced over here. That is one reason why I am glad to see that married students are to be allowed to bring their wives and it is also essential that women themselves should have their fair share of these scholarships.
I notice that the duties of the Commission include the placing of recipients of scholarships. I support what my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford said about the reception of students. As my hon. Friend the Minister will know, there is an admirable organisation for looking after Rhodes scholars, a voluntary organisation run by Miss Mac-Donald. I sincerely hope that a similar organisation will be set up for the students with whom the Bill is concerned. Their numbers will not be large, so there is every chance that they can be given private hospitality. I am a member of the Rhodes scheme and will shortly be receiving two students from Oxford University who are to spend part of their vacation with me.
As I was living in Devonport, last Christmas, I lent my house in London to a married couple, African Tanganyikans from Bukoba. I believe that there are many people who would be willing to take students if they were given their names. I hope that from the House tonight will go out the suggestion that a voluntary organisation or society, such as the Royal Commonwealth Society, will adopt such a scheme forthwith to welcome students as and when they arrive in this country.
I envisage very great difficulty for students with families. They are to come here for only two years and, in

some cases, for only one year. They will find it extremely awkward and time-wasting to get accommodation. I wonder whether the Commonwealth Relations Office could have a scheme similar to that which the Royal Navy has, a hiring scheme, so that flats could be hired which the students could then rent, paying the whole or part of the rent required.
I should like there to be on the Commission someone particularly interested in handicapped persons. I have a great interest in this matter through my connection with the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind. I am glad to say that that society enables interchanges between people of all the Commonwealth countries, for instance, between Canada and the West Indies. The White Paper, Cmnd. 841 mentions the specialised scholars who will deal with certain subjects and says:
This Section"—
that is, the section dealing with teachers for special subjects—
would not be complete without some mention of certain other matters which we have been unable, through pressure of time, to consider in detail. These include courses for those concerned with the education of handicapped children, vocational guidance, educational psychology, probation services"—
which is very important in the Colonies at present—
and welfare services, school libraries and community development.
As there was apparently not time for that subject to be discussed in full, I suggest that the Minister might have another, smaller conference, or get together people with a special knowledge of these subjects so that they can go into the details of the type of person needed for this training and so that the right kind of scholarship can be awarded.
There has been reference to the fact that universities are probably overcrowded and it has been suggested that these students will push out some of our own. Has the Minister considered the new course on social administration to be set up at Swansea University College? I understand that that is to be a two-year course and that there will be 30 students under Mr. Lockhead, who has been an educational adviser to the Trinidad Government and who is now working here. That course is, I understand, receiving a Nuffield grant. Might not this be the right type of place for the


training of such students? This sounds to me to be an admirable course and it would be suitable for both inward and outward students. I should like to know whether it will be one of the courses to be used. It is not a degree course, although it may become so later. The United Nations has set up a scholarship course for 18 students at Swansea. I understand that, unfortunately, not all of those scholarships have been taken up and I gather that the Swansea authorities might be pleased if six scholarships could be allocated through this course under this scheme.
I see that there are provisions for married students. I hope that I am not being too much of a feminist in this debate, but I am concerned about what happens if a married woman student comes to this country. I have met this problem when in Malaya. Is the married woman student to be allowed to bring her husband? If she is earning, as some such students are to support their children, would it be possible for such a student to get an allowance for the children while she is in this country? If she is contributing to the household, will she get some form of allowance to enable her to continue to provide her husband with help in respect of the household while she is away? I have known some very able people who have not been able to undertake this work because they have not had the money with which to help to support their households.
I should like to refer to some words which appear on page 20 of Cmnd. 841:
Some awards might be made to persons who play an important rôle in the life of the community, such as senior administrators in the public or private sectors, provided that there is some attachment during the period of their study or research to a university or comparable institution.
I should like to know what qualifications are envisaged. I can think of a number of women who have not full academic qualifications, but are able administrators in their own country. Will they be eligible to come here to get further instruction?
I am thinking particularly of community centre work. They may not hold a degree, but they have probably attended some classes or a course in their own country and are doing admir-

able work, perhaps as heads of departments. They would be of great use, particularly until we can get the standard of education for women improved.
I now wish to refer to fellowships. Can these be given for informal adult education? I think that there is still a tremendous need for adult education, particularly in the least-developed countries—in other words, countries which have had education for the shortest period of time. I think that my hon. Friend will agree that in so many of the Colonies there is still a great need for the adults to catch up with the young. When children have superior education to their parents, it causes one of the greatest difficulties. One of the things of which we may have been guilty as a colonising Power is the fact that we have too swiftly and too often changed the family traditions. The lack of respect of the young people for their parents and for traditions of the older generation can be one of the saddest things that we can see; and it is not indigenous to most of the countries concerned. I therefore hope that some of these fellowships will be available for this type of informal education.
My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford stressed the question of language, and particularly the English language. I feel that it is equally important for anybody leaving this country to have some knowledge of the language of the country to which he is going. It does not matter whether he has to teach in it; he will probably be teaching in English, but unless a person has some knowledge of the language of the country in which he is to work, live and probably meet the people in their own homes, he will miss a great deal. In any case, I think that he would be a less good teacher if he has no knowledge of the language.
Therefore, I suggest that if we are to have a better understanding between the Commonwealth countries an effort should be made to enable people to acquire a knowledge of the language of the country to which they are going, even if it is simply a colloquial knowledge. It is too often a one-way traffic. We expect everybody to know English and we take little trouble to study other languages.
I should like my right hon. Friend to explain the following words in the


Explanatory and Financial Memorandum to the Bill:
The persons to be selected … will normally be either Commonwealth citizens or British Protected persons although exceptionally, with the special approval of the Secretary of State, awards may be given to residents of other Commonwealth countries who are neither Commonwealth citizens nor British Protected persons.
Who are the people who are neither Commonwealth citizens nor British-protected persons, and yet belong to Commonwealth countries? I should be grateful for an explanation.
With those few words, I welcome the Bill and I wish it every success. I hope that it will be used for the furtherance of friendship throughout the Commonwealth.

6.15 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Creech Jones: I agree with all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken concerning the value and importance of this Bill. I think it is based on a very bold and imaginative conception of the needs of the Commonwealth and, therefore, we are all united in hoping that the speed which has already been shown in the implementation of the conference resolutions may be further accelerated in order that the hopes of the Minister may be realised.
I am encouraged to make one or two points by reference to the plan and report of the conference. It is pointed out that the purpose of the plan is to secure the widest possible variety of cultural exchange, to serve people who can be expected to make a significant contribution to life in their own countries and to make awards other than to persons in the academic field who can play an important part in the life of their community. It is in the context of that purpose that I wish to make my few remarks.
First, I should like to express my own gratification that this Bill completes some of the work which was begun by Oliver Stanley and some of us who succeeded him at the Colonial Office. It makes possible certain facilities in higher education which would not otherwise be available. I had the privilege of being vice-chairman of the West African Committee concerned with higher education in 1942, and I remember my great joy during my period of office as Colonial Secretary in implementing the reports founding the universities in Nigeria, Ghana, Malaya,

East Africa and the West Indies. Therefore, I take a special interest in this further stage in the development of higher education work. One feels that by the exchange which becomes possible as a result of the Bill, some very excellent progress can be made in the cause that we all had at heart when the original work was started.
It is not only because of its educational purpose that I welcome the Bill. I do so also because of the larger objects which it can serve in the Commonwealth. The other day I put a Question to the Minister about the scope of the scheme, and he seemed to convey to me the impression that the plan would be concerned primarily with graduate study and research. I do not minimise the importance of these disciplines in higher education and the vital importance to the Commonwealth of research, but I fear that unless we state a very strong case at this moment there will be a tendency in the administration of this plan for it to be concerned almost exclusively with graduate and postgraduate work.
There is another type of contribution which can be made through this plan and I want to emphasise it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) referred to the place of adult education in our own educational system and to the colleges which have been created here for the benefit of working-class students in order that they may further their usefulness among their own people. I am very interested in adult education. It is pleasant to note that both the Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition are vice-presidents of the Workers' Educational Association. I am therefore sure that both of them will appreciate the point which I am about to make.
We all know that in many of our overseas territories democracy is a very delicate plant which calls for very careful cultivation and, because of tradition and economic and other special difficulties, is not likely to flourish as we know it in Britain today. There are great risks. One of the greatest factors in the success of a system of political democracy is the education of the ordinary people of the country. It is of vital importance that some attention


should be paid to adult education as it is being worked out in a number of the territories overseas. When we were founding university colleges overseas, I was anxious that extra-mural departments should be created in them in order that some of this adult education might be made possible. In most of the university colleges, these extra-mural departments are working and are securing most beneficial results for the territories concerned.
I press that facilities under the Bill ought to be made available to tutors and teachers in extra-mural departments as well as to tutors who are working out in the hinterland, in far away places, and doing this pioneer work. I should like to see an exchange of tutors, because a great deal of knowledge and experience is available in this country concerning adult education. I hope, therefore, that the claims of adult education will not be overlooked in the administration of the Bill.
Indeed, I will go further and say that there are students who have never had the opportunity of going to universities and who may never have that opportunity—some have not even had secondary school opportunities. From our experience in Ruskin College, Oxford, and elsewhere they make first-class students and are able to reap even greater advantage later if they are permitted to enter the universities. For instance, both Oxford and Cambridge universities permit some of the better students from the extra-mural side as well as from workers' residential colleges to enjoy scholarships in the universities. That experience and opportunity help them on their return home to play their part in the common life of the community. I hope that in the administration of the scheme there will be an opportunity not only for teachers and tutors to come here to see something of the way in which this side of study is organised but also for students from overseas to study here and to return to their countries with greater usefulness.
The hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) referred to another class of study which is of importance—that concerned with the social sciences, sociology and social welfare. She referred to the excellent work which has been done at Swansea University College. I emphasise how

very important it is that some of the best social workers in some of our dependencies overseas should have an opportunity to continue their study or to take refresher courses at Swansea, Liverpool or London, where there are departments of social science and where most useful experience can be gained. Such students can later return to their own territories and be of even greater use than they are at present.
I am entitled to say this because a scholarship has been founded in my name by the Workers' Travel Association to bring students to study social science and welfare at Swansea University College. I want that kind of experiment to be enlarged so that many other students can enjoy the facilities available under the Bill.
I make the next point with some caution, but I am following the line set by the hon. Lady the Member for Devonport in her reference to the composition of the Commission, which will have the duty of administering the scheme. It may be that I have a little prejudice about the universities. I am not as eulogistic about Oxford as was the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) when I recall some of its not-so-ancient history in religious tolerance and human liberty.
Having said that, however, I notice that the Commission will be composed of at least four academic persons of high distinction. I hope that the Commission will not be exclusively academic or drawn exclusively from the universities. The Minister should cast his net a little wider than that. There are distinguished people in public life who could play a valuable part on a Commission such as this. If the Minister will look at the Board of Queen Elizabeth House at Oxford he will find on it an extraordinarily interesting mixture of people with a variety of experience. Persons of this wide range of experience could serve with very great advantage on a Commission such as this.
Moreover, there are many bodies in this country who could make a contribution to the Commission. I refer, for instance, to Chatham House—say the Director of Chatham House—to the W.E.A., to the British Council, whose use in the administration of the scheme will be of great importance, and to the Arts Council of Great Britain. These bodies and others have great public experience. They are


made up of men who do not live in ivory towers and who do not become somewhat cut off from the rough and tumble of life and the main stream of living. It is possible to blend in this kind of work people of academic distinction with others of a little more robust experience, if I may say so. I therefore hope that in setting up the Commission the Minister will try to make it as broadly representative as possible while not ignoring the vital importance of high academic representation on it.
There is very much more about the Bill which I should like to say, particularly regarding the very unfortunate discriminatory practices now creeping into higher education in the Union of South Africa and the enlargement of our own universities so that British students are not prejudiced in the number of places available to them in our universities. We must recognise that the Bill is of tremendous importance. I welcome it and sincerely hope that in its administration we may secure the results for which we all hope. I congratulate the Government on bringing in the Bill.

6.31 p.m.

Mr. Philip Goodhart: As the right hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Creech Jones), who has done so much for education himself, said, this is a time for congratulation. We should congratulate the Government on introducing this Measure. It also affords an opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) on his remarkable maiden speech.
I hope, however, that the Government will not be swept away by his eloquence, which was reinforced by Members on both sides of the House, when he said that children of ordinary scholars should be charged up to the scheme. There will never be enough money to go round in this sphere, and I share the doubts of my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford whether we shall be able to get away with £1,000 a year per student as the overall cost of the scheme.
If we add to this the cost of transporting a whole lot of little children who will catch cold, and throw their brussels sprouts on the floor and will not remember a single thing about their journey to this country a few years after

they have left it, it seems to me that we shall waste resources that necessarily must be limited. I welcome the Bill, however, both for what it is itself and for what may evolve from it if the Commission develops on sound and satisfactory lines.
The general problem of admitting overseas students to British universities is exceedingly difficult. At the moment, it is rather a hit-or-miss matter. Often the student has little idea of the real merit of the college which he is applying to enter and, in turn, the college often has very little idea of the real merit of the student who has applied to enter it. London University has done a tremendous amount in the development of education in the Commonwealth, but I am told that last year one of the women's colleges admitted a woman from the Commonwealth who had no knowledge of the English language at all. She sent in an application and a splendid letter, setting forth her qualifications, which had been written for her in English by a friend. When she arrived bearing this letter, it was too late to do anything about it. No one bothered to make inquiries about this applicant in her own territory.
I would not wish to see a rigid bureaucratic system of control of university entrance selection imposed on colleges, but I hope that if the Commission works well it will become an academically acceptable clearing house for the large number of students who wish to come from the Commonwealth to universities in this country.
The Bill is a challenge to the people of Great Britain. These scholarships will be a direct benefit to this country and to the Commonwealth as a whole only if the holders of them enjoy themselves when they are here. Often we smugly assume that to know us is to love us, but, unfortunately, many of the worst enemies of the British Commonwealth are those who have come and studied in universities in this country and have, perhaps, unwisely, lapped up the doctrines of Harold Laski and Kingsley Martin. It would be difficult to say that this has been of real benefit to the Commonwealth.
Loneliness is a very serious problem. I was severely shaken to read in the


P.E.P. work on this subject the remark of a Jamaican student in this country. He said:
It is possible to make friends with the English, but it is so much trouble that it is not really worth while.
If a substantial number of Commonwealth scholars go back to the countries from which they came feeling this, it could well be that the scheme will do more harm than good. Anyone who wishes to advance the cause of Commonwealth solidarity can hardly do better than ensure that the people who come here as scholars under the scheme never have the opportunity to feel lonely, unwanted and without friends.
The Bill will be of particular help to those going to universities. During the last eight years a very great deal of help has been given by the Government, through the British Council, and by the universities themselves, to students who have come here from the Commonwealth. However, during those years the pattern of people coming from the Commonwealth to this country has been transformed. Nine years ago, fully three-quarters of the students who came from the Commonwealth went to the universities. Now, the proportion going to the universities from the Commonwealth—and the overall total of students has just about trebled in that time—is only half. The remainder go to technical colleges, polytechnics and to the commercial colleges about which hon. Members opposite have spoken. Those students need help just as much as those going to the universities. Their problems of readjustment are just as great, and often worse. I hope that we shall not lose sight of them in emphasising the contribution that the universities can make.
The students themselves and the experts are, for once, in agreement that in helping Commonwealth students at technical colleges, polytechnics and universities the thing that we really want to do is to increase the number of places in hostels. Living in hostels does not remove all the problems. I heard the other week of a Moslem student who went to live in a hostel. His most treasured possession was a quantity of sand which he had brought from Mecca. Alas, an over-zealous domestic servant swept the whole lot up with a Hoover

cleaner. Naturally, he was exceedingly upset, but, by and large, it is fair to say that the collection of students in hostels, in which there should be a substantial proportion of British students as well, is the best contribution that we can make towards helping Commonwealth students here.
I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Minister has accepted the Bill as the opening of an era rather than as an end in itself. If we look at this problem from that point of view it can be of immense benefit to the Commonwealth as a whole.

6.40 p.m.

Dr. Horace King: The House will have noted with pleasure that throughout this debate we have had the presence of three right hon. Members who have held the office of Minister of Education, two on the Government side and one on this side of the House. I was interested to hear the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. G. Lloyd), the previous Minister of Education, pay a glowing tribute to the present Minister for his part in the conference which led to this Bill. Both he and the present Minister have made an impact on the Ministry of Education in this direction.
I remember the present Minister of Education, when some of us pressed him several years ago in the House, improving the financial arrangements for teachers whom we send on exchange to other parts of the Commonwealth. It is still financially difficult for a teacher to give up his job in this country and go out for a year into some other part of the world, but there has been a considerable improvement. I know that at the time the Minister improved the conditions he cut down the number of teachers whom he sent. Since then, however, he has increased the number.
The present Measure owes quite a lot to the impact of the present Minister of Education and the way in which he pressed the claims of education at the Commonwealth Education Conference. I pay tribute, also, to the Minister of State, Commonwealth Relations Office, and congratulate him on his speed in introducing the Bill and on the speech with which he moved its Second Reading.
I am glad that the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) said what he did. The debate has, I am afraid, been a little too self-congratulatory and complacent. After all, we are deciding to embark upon a scheme that will cost us about 2d. per head per year at the beginning and which, when it really gets into full swing, will cost us 2s. per head per year, or the cost of a packet of cigarettes. This is one of the best investments for 2s. in which the House of Commons could indulge. The possible benefits are beyond imagining.
I regard the Commonwealth as the finest experiment so far in the world in the free association together of nations in one group. Whether it can live and flourish depends not only upon ourselves, but upon other members of the Commonwealth. I am certain that it cannot stand still and that either it will disintegrate or it will come much closer together. Today's Bill, together with much of the post-war work of the Ministers for Commonwealth Affairs, is deliberately and happily designed to bring the nations of the Commonwealth even more closely together.
If we want to achieve that, it must mean ultimately that the Commonwealth shall share the wealth in common which its separate members possess. What the richer nations in the Commonwealth have must be placed generously at the disposal of the poorer nations, in the economic, technical, scientific, financial and medical spheres.
I was struck by the references made by the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) to blindness in the Commonwealth and to the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind. It is a matter of simple fact that millions of people inside the Commonwealth are blind and that much of that blindness is preventable. Malaria and sleeping sickness can be destroyed from the Commonwealth. Today, we have the scientific "know-how" and provided that we are able to put the necessary resources in the hands of the scientific agencies we can remove these two scourges from the Commonwealth. Indeed, already we are moving along that line.
I welcome in that spirit the fact that the Bill seeks to give to the other nations

of the Commonwealth some of the benefits and some of the wealth in education that Britain possesses. It is impossible to describe what the impact of a teacher who is teaching children in another Commonwealth country, after having experienced life in Britain, can mean. Teachers can be great ambassadors for peace. As teachers inside the Commonwealth pass on the common heritage of the Commonwealth to the children with whom they come in contact, that will be a means of binding the sister-nations more closely together. I go much further and say that just as we need summit conferences, we need conferences at the base between people, not only inside the Commonwealth, but in other nations.
We must be prepared to pay the price for this spreading of education. The young men who come to our country under the scheme will experience what all young men experience when they come from the Commonwealth: the joy of utter political equality; and having experienced it, they will not go back to any part of the Commonwealth without the determination that they will take political equality with them.
The hon. Lady the Member for Devonport said that we make little provision for women. A great contribution to the emancipation of women throughout the Commonwealth can be the work that we do under the Bill. Education is a great emancipator. We have much to give, but we also have quite a lot to receive. The poorer countries—I think particularly of the Commonwealth countries in Africa which I visited—cannot by any manner of means afford the educational structure that we think it right that all children should have.
This is one of the capital investments that the poorer nations in the Commonwealth simply cannot afford. It is idle to ask them to make the same provision of investing in the future that the richer nations like ourselves can do. Therefore, anything that we can do to relieve the young Commonwealth country which is moving from a more primitive to a modern state of society of some of the heavy capital burden of education, is something that we ought to do gladly.
We have, however, quite a lot to gain ourselves from the other countries of the


Commonwealth. Do not let us imagine that the African who may be economically poor has nothing to give culturally to Western society. As for the richer countries, the exchanges that we make with Canada can be profitable both to British and Canadian education. I have had the privilege of speaking in many universities in Canada and in the new world, exchanging views on education and on the pattern of education in the new world as compared with ours.
if this were an education debate, I would enlarge on the simple fact that we have to give the new world the need for a greater intellectual content of education of abler children—the fallacy of egalitarianism in education and the notion held by Canada and America that it is undemocratic to promote a bright child and make him work harder than a child of less ability, just as Canadian schools have much that is refreshing to give to a country like ours, which still runs its education on a class system.
The interchange of teaching and educational experience with young Commonwealth graduates and teachers coining over here, seeing our work in the schools and universities and taking back that experience, and the complementary work that goes on on the part of British students who have been sent overseas, can be of great benefit to all the universities of the Commonwealth, including even Oxford—England.
I want to pursue just a little further this question of the poverty of the poorest Commonwealth students who come here. I had in the Gallery only last night a young man from Africa, whom I took around the Palace of Westminster. He is working his way through the university as surely and as hardly as any poor American student works his way. He is here without any grant from his Government, having saved up just enough to try to get through his course in law at London University.
It has been my privilege in Africa to meet wonderful parents who have made, for the education of the first generation of African students to come here, sacrifices compared with which the sacrifices parents in this country make, even middle-class parents sending their children to public school, are trivial. The Africans are hungry for education, and the sacrifices they are prepared to make

to get their children first to school—and even primary education there is expensive comparatively—and then to give the able children their chance in a college or university, have to be seen to be believed.
The Commonwealth Governments themselves are already providing some scholarships, and if I sound a little grudging about the amount of provision which is being made in the Bill, we have to set it on top of all the work that is already being done, and to which the Minister of State rightly referred, under schemes such as the Rhodes Scholarships or the magnificent Fulbright Scholarships which I regard as a major contribution to understanding between ourselves and one of our major allies.
I want, however, to emphasise that with this Bill we are only scratching the problem of the utter needs for education in the poorest parts of the Commonwealth. I spent some time three years ago in an African village, where two huts had been knocked together by anxious parents so that a teacher, who proudly boasted she could take children up to Standard III, could teach the children of the village, pending the arrival of the first actual school in that village. If our teachers complain, with some justification, that half our children are being taught in classes over the prescribed legal maxima in this country, then that young teacher was teaching 70 children in two huts knocked together. Of the children who receive primary education in some parts of that country—and only a fraction receive primary education—only a fraction complete the primary course, and of that fraction only a tiny handful receive secondary education.
So I am interested in this Bill particularly from the point of view of the provision of teachers to teach children in the poorer parts of the Commonwealth. I hope that the Minister of Education will not cease to encourage British teachers to go out to the Commonwealth, university teachers, training college teachers, and increase the number sent each year so that they may help to create in the young universities and schools of the Commonwealth the personnel of quality who can lead the young Commonwealth countries along the way that they have to go. I welcome the fact that we shall be bringing here


able students, post-graduate, expert teachers, from the other parts of the Commonwealth so that they may go back to create the seed corn which is so vitally necessary in every part of the Commonwealth.
This is a Bill for State effort which has been preceded by voluntary effort, and I would end by saying that I hope that voluntary effort will not dry up as a result of the comparatively small provision we make by the Bill. I may mention that Southampton University students hope to provide a scholarship deliberately aimed at bringing to England from Africa one of the black students whom the South African whites are depriving of proper opportunities of education. I should like to see all the universities of England doing that. I hope that some time we may persuade the local authorities themselves each to adopt some part of the Commonwealth and each to make provision for the education in Britain every year of a Commonwealth student from the poorer parts of the Commonwealth so that the trained students may go back and build up education in the Commonwealth.
I welcome the Bill, and I congratulate the Minister of State on his initiative and imaginative drive in presenting it.

6.55 p.m.

Mr. Brian Harrison: I want to follow up two points which the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Dr. King) has made. If I may say so without seeming patronising, I thought he struck the right balance about this Bill, about the difference between complacency with what is being achieved and the desire, which was expressed by an hon. Gentleman opposite, to enlarge the scope of the Bill because it did not yet tackle the problem.
This has got to be looked at as the first piece in the mosaic. Some details have been mentioned—and I will come to them later—of the complete mosaic, but this is the first piece, and it is essential that it be soundly placed in position. My fear is not so much that we are going to do too little with this piece, the beginning, but that we may not be able to get going the basic organisation for having those 500 students properly accommodated, properly looked after, and having the sorts of courses which they want with

the facilities which there are. I very much hope that thorough planning will go into the programme for the first lot of students who come over here, because if by any chance there are hitches with the first draft the scheme will get a bad name, and that will do irreparable damage.
The other point mentioned by the hon. Gentleman which I want to take up is that about teachers going to the Commonwealth. I do not think it is possible—I agree with him wholeheartedly—to over-emphasise the amount of good that these sorts of visits and exchanges can do. I know from my own experience. I was, admittedly, not at the sort of school to which the hon. Gentleman referred, of two mud huts, but I was at school in Australia, and I can remember the impression created in my mind as a schoolboy by some of the stories and some of the things we are told about England by exchanged masters who happened to be form masters for a year or two.
The point I want to make is that we must endeavour to persuade the local authorities to try, though I know it is difficult with the shortage of teachers, to make it easier for people in their areas to go out to other countries in the Commonwealth, because I am sure that at present when teachers see these opportunities they feel that they may prejudice their promotion at a later date. We ought to spread the idea which my hon. Friend the Minister of State put forward, that a person should almost be regarded as not suitable for promotion unless he has done a period somewhere in the Commonwealth.
This scheme, or this first part of this scheme, is immensely valuable, because it will act as a very strong cement in the rather tenuous ties which hold the Commonwealth together. I am never quite sure what exactly it is that holds the Commonwealth together. I do not think that anybody has ever been able to define it, but there is no shadow of doubt that one thing that does is the way in which we can exchange ideas with one another inside the Commonwealth and, because we think along the same lines, are able to work together to find a solution to a number of problems.
This sort of exchange of 500 or 1,000 scholarships throughout the Commonwealth will help very greatly to strengthen


this bond of thinking together, and, of course, it will help in another way. It will help very considerably those areas which have not got the facilities that exist in this country not only to develop what the people who come from a Commonwealth country can give, but what, in turn, the people with whom they come in contact can give. But it is not going to be entirely giving on our part. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) has left the Chamber for the time being, because it is my contention that one thing which has made Oxford what it is is that it has had so many Rhodes Scholars coming in from the Commonwealth. I hate to think where Oxford would be on the rugger field, and even when at times they win the boat race, unless in their teams there were one or two Australians or Rhodes Scholars. The result has been of very considerable advantage to them.
I was interested when one hon. Member referred to the export of brains. The export of real brains is the one export that Commonwealth countries cannot afford, particularly those which are strenuously developing at the present time. It is one of the criticisms of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme at the present time that the number of people who come over here to universities after accepting Rhodes Scholarships or some other form of scholarship, stay here and do not return to their own countries. On the other hand, I endorse most heartily what was said by the same hon. Member in referring to this, which was that in the export of brains from this country to the other countries we are probably in a position, or ought to be now, in which we can afford the loss far better than the developing Commonwealth countries outside the United Kingdom.
There are a number of dangers in this scheme at the present time. Attention has been drawn to the very greatly overcrowded situation in our universities at present, and I think that this scheme will get off to a very bad start if people feel that these vacancies are being made purely at the expense of undergraduates from the United Kingdom. I hope that, in view of the increase in university buildings and so on, arrangements will be made to ensure that people coming

from the Commonwealth do not displace people in the United Kingdom.
I also hope that more emphasis will be laid on moving the undergraduates and scholars who come here to universities other than Oxford, Cambridge and London. There are so many places in the United Kingdom where first-class academic facilities are available and which have not yet been heard of in the other countries in the Commonwealth. We have to make sure that a big campaign of public relations is undertaken by the Commission in order that people may realise the advantages of other universities in the United Kingdom and not just choose one of the three whose names are best known throughout the Commonwealth.
I wish to lay particular emphasis on what happens to the students outside the university, about which we have already heard. There is the case of the student who thought that the English were probably nice to know when one knew them but that the effort was so great. Here I must be very careful, but I think that there is a tendency on the part of the English to think that the English are the nicest people they know, and consequently not to exert themselves too much to get to know people from other islands or other parts of the Commonwealth when they come here.
I was interested to hear the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) mention Miss Mac-Donald and the Dominions Fellowship Trust, which was the name given to the organisation set up by Lady Frances Ryder in the 'twenties. When in New Zealand a few weeks ago I had an interesting experience of the work which an organisation like that can do in looking after students. I met a man, now a senior professor in an agricultural college, who looked after me very generously, and, in fact, arranged to send me some plants. I thanked him and said, "I do not think I can ever repay you." He said: "Quite frankly, you do not need to. When I was over in the United Kingdom as an undergraduate in 1923, Lady Frances Ryder's organisation put me in touch with a number of people and I made some wonderfully good friends while I was over there. I never feel that I can repay the hospitality and friendship that was shown to me in the United Kingdom."
That sort of thing is very important because if the fact that the professor had been well looked after in the time he was here could make the impression that it has made throughout the whole of this man's life, surely it is vitally important that we should see that good impressions are made on the students who come over here.
On the other hand, I know of a case which I found extremely alarming concerning other students. I was working with some African students in London quite recently, and I was horrified when, having suggested that they should organise a football team or something like it, and take part in some athletic events, as there were some very good athletes among them, I was told that I would not get any athletes or athletic organisation in that group. I asked why not, and I was told that it was regarded as a bourgeois activity and that it was ridiculed. The reason was that the moment a team of Africans started playing against one from a British university they tended to make friends, and there was an organisation trying to stop as much as possible these African students making friends with the ordinary British students and undergraduates.
The importance of providing hostels has been mentioned in the debate, but I am not so sure that the provision of hostels is the right way to look after these students. I have always thought that one of the purposes of students coming to this country was to meet other people. There is a tendency, and it is a criticism I have heard of the British Council hostel, for students to come over here only to meet people from their own countries or, possibly, which is slightly better, people from other overseas territories, but, once they are in the hostels, not to meet people from the United Kingdom. One of the desirable objects of this scheme is to ensure that people meet together outside the universities.
I was interested to see from the White Paper that the selection of students will not necessarily be based on academic qualifications and that some awards will be made
to persons who play important rôes in the life of their community".
or people who may
be expected to makea significant contribution to life in their own countries on their return from study overseas.

It is essential that the scheme should not apply merely to those who, I understand, are referred to as "eggheads". It is important that the people who come here should be those who contribute over the widest area to the life of their own community when they return to their own country.
I began by saying that this is only part of the plan. This is the first piece that we are laying in a much wider mosaic. Whilst I welcome this section of the scheme and wish it every possible success, I hope that the Government will be as expeditious in carrying out the other recommendations of the Conference as they have been in getting this part of the scheme under way.

7.12 p.m.

Mr. Laurence Pavitt: There is so much unanimity on this subject that one wonders why so much attention has been paid to the debate, but it should be said that it is a sign of the deep concern that we all have about these problems. I find myself again in the position of being able to be non-controversial and I am delighted that the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr. B. Harrison) has emphasised the need for careful planning. I feel sure that our task in discussing the provisions of the Bill is to ensure the maximum of careful planning so that the results which we all want, on both sides of the House, can be satisfactorily achieved.
The hon. Member for Maldon wondered what made Oxford what it is and whether it was the Rhodes scholars. There are so many things that have made Oxford what it is that I would hate to follow the hon. Member on that path. For my part, I remember the contributions of such people as G. D. H. Cole in various spheres. Perhaps we should give some credit to those people.
I want to address myself principally to the remarks made by the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand). Hon. Members on both sides of the House have been concerned about the purpose to which the education to be received will be put. Mention has been made of cultural exchanges, the flow of ideas and their application to industry, especially in the


countries where industrial and agricultural development is so important. I should like to refer principally to the purposes of education when the results are applied to human relationships and the organisation of people, matters which can make so vital a contribution to the less developed countries.
In spite of the fact that the proposed arrangements make it explicit that the
Plan should pay great attention to the needs of the economically less developed countries
I feel that the balance of attention has been weighted on the side of industrial countries and urban communities. The annex to the report makes it quite plain that the main emphasis will be laid on awards in the academic field, but I hope that this debate will result in more emphasis being given to that part of the scheme which
does not exclude … other people who play important roles in the life of their community.
Paragraph 12 of the report states that the scholarships will be normally open to those people who have successfully completed university degree courses. I hope that greater emphasis will be laid on the claims of those who do not come within this normal category, but are not excluded in the proposed arrangements.
Naturally, we always look at such questions from the viewpoint of a Western community and of an industrialised society basing its social life on urban communities. I make the strongest possible plea for those people who play important roles in community life and are not excluded by the Bill. I ask that the Commission should be persuaded to give scholarships to those non-graduates who play a vital part in developing rural communities in the less industrially developed countries.
I hope that the Commission will approach this problem not only from our viewpoint, but from that of the people of Asia, the West Indies and Africa. In many of these countries as much as 80 per cent. of the life of the people is based on an agrarian economy. Much of it is subsistence farming, share-cropping and things of that kind, which do not correspond agriculturally with the kind of industrialised agriculture that Western countries enjoy. When we consider our educational plans against that background we must also realise the

immense amount of illiteracy that exists in these countries. Among all the forms of assistance that we can give to these countries, I am convinced that the kind of things that we are discussing today and the extension of education are most important.
The great need is to change the static mentality of peasants in these agrarian countries. It is true that these countries are seeking to develop their industrialised sector, but only a minority of the people live in the industrial centres. The vast majority still live in village communities. The Specialised Agencies of the United Nations have recognised this and there is an upsurge of activity in rural development, extension service and agricultural and industrial development schemes Then there are social engineering projects like the Gal Oya scheme in Ceylon and the Thal Development, in Pakistan.
All these things have been encouraged and fostered by the more developed countries to help the under-developed countries, but basic to these plans is the development of co-operation between the people themselves so that they may, as it were, raise themselves by their own shoestrings. This means the organisation in local communities of co-operative societies for all economic and social purposes within village life.
I wish to follow the lead of my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East in asking the Government and the people responsible for executing this plan to pay further attention to institutions like Ruskin College and, in particular, the Co-operative College, at Loughborough, which have played a useful part in educating for leadership in the underdeveloped countries.
Other countries on the American Continent and in Europe have special contributions to make to the community of nations, but the principles and practice of co-operation are peculiarly British. They had their birthplace in this country, they have grown here over 100 years and they have reached a high state of development. Therefore, it is only natural that a British contribution should be made to those countries through a typically British institution, and in my opinion this Bill can facilitate this.
A special training course was instituted in 1946 by the Colonial Office at the Loughborough Co-operative College and since then over 200 students from the Commonwealth have been in residence. I do not know whether the Commonwealth Office has the same kind of advisory services for co-operatives as those possessed by the Colonial Office. Last year, for example, students from British Guiana, Ceylon, Cyprus, Dominica, Ghana, India, Jamaica, Mauritius, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Sarawak, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Trinidad, and Uganda were in residence.
Forgive me if I weary the House with this long list, but I do so to give an idea of the broad basis upon which the course, assisted by the Colonial Office, has been able to extend help to the less developed countries.
In addition to students at the college who have come from Government Departments in various Commonwealth territories, increasing numbers are coming from the voluntary associations and societies, and there is a special need for the extension of educational facilities envisaged in the Bill for this latter class. I hope that the Co-operative College will be fully recognised as suitable for awards under the new plan and that those who will be selecting students will take special account of the facilities which can be offered in this respect.
The Minister has outlined the way in which the Commission will work and the number of people appointed to it. I hope that it will be possible to find at least one place for somebody with a knowledge of the organisation, principles and practice of co-operative societies, so that advice can be available on the appropriate courses of study for rural development workers who are so necessary to the development of their countries.
One drawback of high academic training of people who are to return to work in their own communities is that after being given a taste of concentrated, highly civilised, cultural exchanges between individuals, they find it difficult to go back to a village life, living in kacha or mud houses, doing basic work at community level. In this respect, I welcome the advice from both sides of the House that we should keep our feet on the

ground, and should bear in mind not only the courses of education to be pursued, but the purposes to which they will be put after the students or fellows return to their own countries.
Although it is possible to give a high degree of training in the special skills needed by those who are awarded Commonwealth scholarships, the real need is for students to be able to return to their countries still able to speak in the idiom of the villager, so that they can provide leadership in democracy where it is most needed, at the grass roots.

7.24 p.m.

Mr. G. M. Thomson: This has been a pleasant and important debate; indeed, I have not taken part in a debate when I have found myself saying "Hear, hear" so frequently to speeches from the opposite side.
I will start by paying my tribute to the most distinguished maiden speech of the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). Not only was it a notable speech, but it had a great amount of material in it. There is the tradition that maiden speeches should be non-controversial. The speech of the hon. Gentleman was certainly non-controversial as between his side of the House and ours, but I am not so sure that the Minister would regard it as wholly non-controversial, because the hon. Gentleman made a number of extremely important suggestions for improving the Bill. I agree very much with a number of the points he made.
A number of hon. Members have underlined the importance of one point made by the hon. Gentleman, namely, the need adequately to look after students who come over here on these grants. I do not need to say more on that point, but it is crucial to the success of this scheme. I was particularly glad that the hon. Gentleman, as the Member for Oxford, made the point that there should be a proper spread of awards amongst the universities of the United Kingdom. This also is important for the success of the scheme in terms of making public opinion throughout the country aware of the importance of the operation. If we can get students at provincial universities as well as at the big academic three, that will be valuable.
I was particularly interested in the point made by the hon. Gentleman, with


great authority and knowledge, of the need for a greater cross-migration in Commonwealth relationships. He said that educational and other relationships throughout the Commonwealth should be relationships between members of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom. I was reminded of an occasion in New Delhi when I attended a party in the house of the High Commissioner and enjoyed a programme of calypso records played by West Indian students who were the guests of our High Commissioner there. They were attending Delhi University on scholarships provided by the Indian Government.
The Indian Government have been doing this on a considerable scale, and it is the kind of new relationship within the Commonwealth which we should encourage by every possible means, because it is important in many ways. It is important for getting rid of illusions. For instance, some of the students I met in India were having the difficulties that students coming from foreign countries have when they go to strange surroundings. They were finding that, in this world where colour prejudice is so inflammable, there can be colour prejudices between two coloured countries as well as between a coloured country and a white country. This was valuable.
My hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) has emphasised the fact that many of the countries to which we are referring are agrarian; much of their economic development is agricultural. As a delegate to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference in Delhi, I discovered how much such countries as India and Ghana can learn and can give to each other in terms of agricultural development. They can do much more in this respect than we can because our agricultural experience is so different. I doubt whether great community development schemes have so much to offer to the technically backward members of the Commonwealth, whereas the more this scheme of educational interchange can help to promote such an exchange of information, the more fruitful it will be.
In connection with closer cross-relationships between the various members of the Commonwealth, I make one suggestion to the Minister. I was glad to notice that there is provision in the

Bill for an annual report by the Commission which is to be established. That will be most useful, but I am wondering whether it might not be decided, in consultation with the other Commonwealth countries taking part in the scheme, to include in the annual report an indication of the work which the other Commonwealth countries are doing. This might be done by a series of appendices from the various Commonwealth countries, and it would enable hon. Members of this House to be informed not only on what our own Commission is doing, but how that fits into the general picture of the scheme.
Like other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate I welcome the Bill, and I want to pay a tribute to the Government for the speed with which they have brought it before the House. I am afraid we have become rather accustomed to communiqués from Commonwealth Conferences containing more pious platitudes than promises of action, and it is fine that this Bill should be brought forward with a spirit of urgency.
The general feeling of hon. Members on both sides has been that the proposals in the Bill are good proposals but that we ought not to be too complacent about them or about their scale. I thought that some of the points made about the 500 scholarships which were being offered and how inadequate they were in comparison with the need were a little irrelevant to the proposals in the Bill. The proposals in the Bill are mainly in post-graduate work, and 500 post-graduate scholarships in this country are a considerable addition to post-graduate education generally. I hope we shall realise and that the Government will tell us that they regard the Bill as the first instalment of a much wider and more imaginative plan to implement the purposes of the Commonwealth Education Conference.
Many hon. Members have mentioned the kind of work done by the American Fulbright Commission, and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Sutton Cold-field (Mr. G. Lloyd) said that we should look at what America is doing and try to match our own effort against the American effort. I am told that the United States last year provided scholarships for more than 4,500 foreign students in the United States, as well


as scholarships for very nearly 2,000 American students at all levels, graduate and post-graduate, in countries abroad.
If we look at the American effort in the Commonwealth alone, it is very striking. Pakistan has more than 100 scholarship students in the United States at the moment; India has more than 200. The Fulbright scheme provides for more than 1,000 scholarships both ways between the United States and Britain and the Commonwealth and the various colonial dependencies.
Against that picture, the Bill must be regarded as the first very welcome instalment, but only the first instalment, for very much wider progress in the future. Like other hon. Members, I want to emphasise that, even within the limits of the Bill and although it will be mainly post-graduate the Commission ought to try to interpret its remit as widely as possible and take particular note of the comment, which has been quoted, made In the Report of the Commonwealth Education Conference, in paragraph 17, which states:
The awards should normally be in the academic field, but the possibility should not be excluded of making some awards to other persons who play an important role in the life of their community.
This is very important indeed.
I hope the Commission will take the advice of the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) and invite a fair share of women to enjoy these scholarships, particularly women active in the public life of their own countries who may not have had the opportunity of a formal academic education. That would be very much within the spirit of the proposals in the Bill.
I should like to emphasise that the Commission should share out these awards with particular emphasis on the less technically advanced members of the Commonwealth. This is laid down in the White Paper, and I hope that particular note will be taken of it. I have uneasy memories of one Commonwealth conference I attended. We were discussing Commonwealth efforts to help underdeveloped territories, and one of the most passionate speeches was made by the delegate from Australia, who felt that Australia was one of the principal under-developed countries of the Commonwealth. In a certain sense that is

true, but not in the sense in which we distribute these educational awards. They can produce the biggest and most fruitful results in the technically less advanced countries, and I hope that the Commission will bear that in mind when making these awards.
We have had a long debate and, by its very nature, we have been in agreement with each other. I therefore do not intend to take up much more time on this subject. I feel most strongly that it is one way in which we can give our Commonwealth reality in the modern world and one way in which we can make it a really multi-racial community. An educational interchange programme, especially if it is an interchange programme and works both ways, is the best way to help the less technically advanced members of the Commonwealth. It is a way in which help can be given by the better-off countries to the less-well-off countries without involving that loss of self-respect which often exists in the relationship between giver and receiver. For that reason, I welcome it particularly.
I shall not quickly forget an experience which I had at Delhi University, where I attended one of the excellent courses which the British Council runs in universities overseas. This was a course for teachers of English in various universities of India. These were university teachers, mostly young people but graduates, who in the period before the war would undoubtedly have been leaders in the agitation against British rule in India; but there they were listening engrossed to an interesting lecture about the poetry of Byron and the speech Byron once made in another place. When I talked to the students afterwards they all had a common ambition to come to this country for a little while and enjoy a period of study at a university in the United Kingdom. There is a tremendous fund of good will there. The same good will exists in the other newer members of the Commonwealth. I hope that the Bill will mean that in the years that lie ahead, by a really imaginative, spectacular and generous effort, we shall make the fullest possible use of that good will.

7.37 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations (Mr. Richard Thompson): It is a very gratifying but,


I fear, an all too rare experience to be associated with a Bill about which everyone feels very much the same. I must say, having heard every word of every speech, that the degree of unanimity has been most impressive. I accept absolutely that not all of it has been uncritical, but there is no doubt that the general feeling expressed on both sides is that this is one of the most imaginative Measures we have had for a long time. I am quite certain that it is in that spirit that in due course we shall enact it.
I was particularly grateful to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) for the tribute he paid at the commencement of the proceedings to the Government on the speed with which they had acted in this matter. He raised two particular points in his speech, and I hope that I can reassure him on both of them. First, the additional provision which the Bill lays down is a net addition to what is being done now. Let there be no doubt about that. The other point on which he and other hon. Members have expressed anxiety was that the awards of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission should not necessarily always go to universities. He was anxious that other institutions might be eligible for providing higher education for these people. I can assure him that that is what the Commission will have in mind; indeed, it is the intention.
One or two themes have emerged from the discussion we have had this afternoon, and one of these is the very important question of the reception of these students when they first come to this country. That was mentioned by a number of hon. Members, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse), whose remarkable maiden speech has received well-deserved tributes from all sides of the House. As this is a matter of interest to so many hon. Members, perhaps I might say a word about it.
The arrangements for the social welfare—if I might put it that way—of the students will be in the hands of the British Council, and I think I will say why that is. In the first place, the British Council has a very wide experience indeed of doing this kind of thing. Secondly, the number of students when

we get to the second year and build up to the maximum will be 500, which is very substantial, and, therefore, it is quite a big problem, and I think it is too big a job to be thrust on to some newly created ad hoc body, especially when we reflect that the earliest batch of students will be arriving next year. In any case, if we did this we should probably have to borrow personnel from the British Council to help make the scheme work, and I do not think it is sensible to have any overlapping in these arrangements.
We attach particular importance to getting these arrangements right, and the British Council proposes to make special arrangements for this type of scholar and not simply lump him along with others We want the feeling to get about that a Commonwealth scholar is a very distinguished type of person indeed, as he will be.
I have taken a certain amount of trouble to ascertain what these arrangements are, and I can say that they are very comprehensive indeed. They start before the student comes to this country with an initial briefing in his own country, telling him roughly what to expect and making all the necessary arrangements for his passage and so on. They then follow on with reception here and the first few days after his arrival, a week or so, which will be particularly important because first impressions can mean so much. Then they go on to take a genuine interest in him while he is here. They help him in connection with his living accommodation, making contacts for him, advising him of the services which are available in the country, trying to help him with vacations and interesting things to do; in other words, trying to integrate him into the country which for a time he has made his home.
I think hon. Members in all parts of the House will agree with me about the vital importance of getting things right at that stage. Indeed, it could have a very marked effect on the academic distinction or otherwise which the student secures. If he is in harmonious surroundings feeling that he is among friends, he will unquestionably do much better and go away a far better ambassador for this country than if that kind of thing went wrong. Finally, the idea


is that his departure home again should be similarly looked after and proper reception arrangements made back where he came from.
I have spent a little time on that subject, but so many hon. Members expressed themselves as being anxious about it that I thought it was probably worth while to do so.
My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford raised a point about which other hon. Members spoke, whether the scale of allowances for these people when they are over here is really adequate, whether the figure of £1,000 would prove to be enough. The scale that we contemplate compares favourably with any other that we pay. There is none higher. While we are not rigid or bigoted about this, I think we shall find that in practice it will probably be all right, but it is something upon which we should keep a very close watch.
While I am on the subject of allowances, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers)—perhaps I might take this opportunity of acknowledging what she does in the way of hospitality for students from Colonial Territories and Commonwealth countries—was concerned about the question of marriage allowance. She put the case of the married woman student who came here in her own right. I must confess that the way we have looked at it, with what I feel sure she would call our male prejudice, up to now has been that the bulk of the scholars coming over here would be men, and possibly married. However, I can tell her that the administration of the scholarship plan is intended to be sufficiently flexible and that the kind of arguments which she has put forward will certainly fall upon receptive ears. As to the question of having a woman representative on the Commission, the Commission has not yet been appointed, but I am perfectly certain that my noble Friend will give close attention to that aspect of the matter also.
The right hon. Member for West Bromwich (Mr. Dugdale) asked one or two questions. He wanted to know who would be responsible for the nomination of scholars from the Colonial Territories. I have to tell him that the Commission is not responsible for them, nor, indeed, will it be responsible for the selection

of United Kingdom candidates for scholarships offered at colonial colleges. The Commission will select only from the list which comes forward to it from the territory concerned in the case of incoming students, and in the case of outgoing students it is, so to speak, submitting a short list, but not the final list, to the receiving authority. These duties will be carried out by bodies which already exist in the Colonial Territories. The point is that the Commission is not the sole judge and jury in this matter.
The right hon. Gentleman also had something to say about the question of the principles of selection. The Commission will be advised by an advisory panel of 40 experts in the academic field in this country who will serve in an honorary capacity. They will, I am sure, be very broadly based and will be in a position to give the most disinterested as well as the most expert advice on all these matters.

Mr. Dugdale: I am prepared to believe that they will be very disinterested, but I wanted to know the principles on which they will work, whether it will be a matter of having the best person in any subject or having a certain number of subjects and so many in one subject and so many in another.

Mr. Thompson: What will happen will be that the field from which they select in the very first place will have been narrowed down by the sponsoring countries. Therefore, they will not have a completely free hand because they will not know the type of candidate coming forward. However, I am certain that, within that limitation, the intention is to carry out these duties in as broad a way as they possibly can to try to give the specialisations, as it were, a crack of the whip.
The hon. Member for Stirling and Falkirk Burghs (Mr. Malcolm MacPherson), in an interesting speech, made a point which he made the other day in a Question to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He wondered whether the capacity of our universities as at present constituted was sufficient to sustain this influx of graduates. I will not weary him by repeating what my right hon. Friend said at the time, but perhaps I could add that I think there is some misconception about the degree of over-


crowding which might arise as a result of this scheme. Many hon. Members seem to have assumed that the scholars will be undergraduates, but the great majority—not all—will be graduates. I am advised that with post-graduates the pressure is nothing like so severe as it is with undergraduates. The university authorities have not expressed any undue concern on that point in our discussions with them up to now.
That leads me to what was said by my hon. Friend for Rye (Mr. Godman Irvine). He was a little adrift on this matter when he referred to the difficulty of getting our students into Canadian universities. Here, again, he was referring to undergraduates with whom the Bill is not mainly concerned. He should take some comfort from the fact that, as a result of the Bill and the forth-comingness of the Canadian Government, which we all acknowledge, 250 scholarships have been made available by that Government. I have no doubt that the United Kingdom will get its appropriate share of them and, to that extent, there should be some easing of the position, but mainly of the graduate pressure.
Apart from matters of hospitality and allowances, with which I have dealt, my hon. Friend the Member for Devonport asked why it was that in certain circumstances persons who were not Commonwealth citizens or British protected citizens could be considered for these awards. That stipulation has been included for the practical reason that in certain countries—and I am thinking particularly of Australia—there may be very promising children of, possibly, Irish parents or other stock who have not acquired British nationality and who would be technically outside the ambit of the Bill. Such children might be very promising and, to all intents and purposes, domiciled in such a country. It is felt that it would be wrong to exclude such people, and this is thus a sensible provision. In case anyone might think that we might be swamped by such people, another safeguard is that the sponsoring country will not put forward the names of those who might leave the country never to return and who in later life would not devote their talents and aptitudes to that country. I do not think that there is any scope for this provision to be abused.
Although, strictly speaking, it does not arise under the Bill, the next question is that of teacher-training. Several hon. Members have referred to the desirability of more teachers going to the underdeveloped countries and a greater exchange between teachers of one country and another. It is true that the Oxford Conference recommended that teacher-training facilities should be improved and expanded, and it made several detailed recommendations to that end.
With the co-operation of the associations of local authorities and teachers, who have received the recommendations of the conference, I am glad to say, with interest and enthusiasm, the United Kingdom Government are planning that an additional 500 places in teacher-training establishments of all kinds shall be made available for Commonwealth students over the next five years.
The students to whom those additional places are to be assigned will be assisted by the payment of fees and maintenance allowances from Government funds. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Education is in touch with the authorities in the training colleges about carrying out this proposal. I recognise that there is a serious shortage of teachers throughout the Commonwealth. The Conference reached the conclusion that the most effective help which the more advanced countries could give in the short term to help them to deal with that was to fill certain key posts. The Government hope, again with the co-operation of the local authorities concerned, that a gradually increasing number of teachers from the United Kingdom will be encouraged to take up posts in the Commonwealth.
The Government will make money available to remove some of the financial obstacles which have stood in the way of recruiting teachers for the overseas service. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Education is in close touch with all those concerned about other ways in which service abroad can be made more attractive to the United Kingdom teacher
We all recognise that it would have been very nice to legislate for our plans for teacher training and the supply of teachers in this Bill, but the provisions


for the administration of the teacher-training scheme have not yet been fully worked out with all the local authorities concerned, and we felt that it would not be right to hold up this Measure until we could reach finality on the other.
Although this is only a two-Clause Bill, it is a Measure of the most far-reaching significance. As my hon. Friend observed when moving the Second Reading, the Bill may well inaugurate a new chapter in Commonwealth development and relationship in education comparable with what was inaugurated in economic co-operation by the Ottawa Agreements of 1932. The Bill is a great landmark. It represents the determination of a group of free and independent peoples of varying race, tradition and economic attainments, some 660 million people, getting on for one quarter of the human race, to help one another, each according to his capacity, so that the benefits of higher education, of advanced technology and research shall be shared to the advancement and benefit of all.
The great era of educational co-operation which the Bill foreshadows is no new departure for the Commonwealth. Already great strides have been made. Of the rather more than 100,000 university students enrolled at universities in the United Kingdom, more than 11,000 come from overseas, which is one in nine—probably the highest proportion in the world—and no fewer than 7,000 of those are from the Commonwealth. I mention those figures because they clearly show that this country is already sharing its academic resources with the world and particularly with the Commonwealth, in which we have such a special and abiding interest, in the most remarkable fashion.
The Bill will accelerate and enlarge that process and ensure that the higher education increasingly becoming available, not only in the old Commonwealth countries where the facilities are more substantial but also in the new, is available for United Kingdom students as well. In short, I believe that the Bill is one of the most imaginative and constructive measures affecting the Commonwealth ever to be placed before the House, and in that belief I confidently commend it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Whitelaw.]

Committee Tomorrow.

COMMONWEALTH SCHOLARSHIPS [MONEY]

[Queen's Recommendation signified.]

Considered in Committee under Standing Order No. 84 (Money Committees).

[Major Sir WILLIAM ANSTRUTHER-GRAY in the Chair]

Resolved,
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to make provision for matters arising out of the recommendations of the Commonwealth Education Conference it is expedient to authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of the expenses of the Secretary of State—
(a) in making awards arising out of the Scholarship Plan put forward by the Conference to persons coming to the United Kingdom,
(b) in supplementing awards so arising to persons going from the United Kingdom to other countries, and
(c) in defraying the expenses of any Commission constituted by the said Act to exercise functions so arising (including travelling and other allowances to members of the Commission and its committees and advisers).—[Mr. R. Thompson.]

Resolution to be reported.

Report to be received Tomorrow.

ATOMIC ENERGY AUTHORITY [MONEY]

Resolution reported,
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to increase the maximum number of members of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of any increase in the sums payable out of moneys so provided under section four of the Atomic Energy Authority Act, 1954, which is attributable to provisions of the said Act of the present Session increasing the maximum number of members of the Authority and providing for the application of any pension scheme maintained by the Authority to officers and other persons employed by the National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science.

Resolution agreed to.

Orders of the Day — ATOMIC ENERGY AUTHORITY BILL

Considered in Committee.

[Major Sir WILLIAM ANSTRUTHER-GRAY in the Chair]

Clause 1.—(INCREASE OF MAXIMUM NUMBER OF MEMBERS OF AUTHORITY.)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Clause stand part of the Bill.

8.3 p.m.

Mr. Roy Mason: Before the Committee parts with the Clause, I would like to ask the Minister two questions. First, can he help us about the formation of the new Board? At the moment, there are four full-time members and six part-time members. Have the Government decided how many full-time members they will allow the Authority in future? The right hon. Gentleman said that the Government would try to maintain the same proportions, but it would help if the right hon. Gentleman could clarify the position and tell us how many full-time members will be required. From that we can work out what the reorganised Board will be like.
Secondly, because of the charges constantly levelled against the Authority about future nuclear power costs, and especially those being bandied about between the Central Electricity Generating Board, the National Coal Board, and members of the Consortium, would the right hon. Gentleman consider the suggestion that one of the members of the Board should in future be responsible for cost evaluation? That member could keep the public and the industry generally informed.

The Minister of Education (Sir David Eccles): At present, they are four full time members. As I think I mentioned on Second Reading, it is my noble Friend's intention to appoint Sir Leonard Owen to the Board. That will make five full-time members. We have six part-time members and I think for the time being my noble Friend is considering whether he should add any more. The purpose of asking for a total membership of 15 in Clause 1 is to give my noble Friend some elbow room against future developments.
I will pass the hon. Gentleman's second suggestion to my noble Friend. As a matter of company structure I think that boards are homogeneous and have a combined responsibility. It might be a little difficult to have one member of the Board having a specific function in regard to the public. I should have thought that that was more the Chairman's responsibility, but I will mention what the hon. Gentleman has said to my noble Friend.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 2 to 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Bill reported, without Amendment; read the Third tune and passed.

POST OFFICE AND TELEGRAPH (MONEY) BILL

Considered in Committee; reported, without Amendment; read the Third time and passed.

Orders of the Day — SHIPBUILDING (TRANSFER OF FUNCTIONS)

8.7 p.m.

Mr. James Callaghan: I beg to move,
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that the Transfer of Functions (Construction of Ships) Order, 1959 (S.I., 1959, No. 1829) dated 30th October, 1959, a copy of which was laid before this House on 2nd November, be annulled.
We are very dubious about the transfer of these functions. They have lain with the Admiralty now for twenty years, and whatever our complaints may have been about the Admiralty, there is no doubt that that Department has exercised a very watchful eye over the progress of the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industries. We want some assurances from the Minister of Transport that it is in the interests of these industries that the functions which have hitherto been carried out by the Admiralty should be transferred.
These functions have been dealt with by the Admiralty under Vote 14 of the Navy Estimates. An explanatory note on page 211 of the Navy Estimates, 1959–60, says:
As a result the Vote is small, but it has been retained in order to bring out the Admiralty's continued responsibility as the production authority for the merchant shipbuilding, ship repairing and marine engineering industries and for maintaining contact with these industries on all matters of common concern. In particular, the Admiralty endeavour to assist them whenever help is necessary, for example, in the procurement of scarce materials and components.
I think that the Admiralty has discharged that task. I have had the good fortune to sit both in that Department and in the Ministry of Transport, and I have seen it at both ends. It is fair to say that the Admiralty has done its best to look after the interests of these industries.
Shipbuilding is a great industry, despite some of the denigration that has been directed at it over recent months and years. It is one of our major industries. It provides a great deal of revenue from the export of some of the best ships in the world, and it merits well of the nation.
I wonder whether it is right to transfer this function to the Ministry of Transport. It is not as though that Ministry has been the most glowing success in the constellation of Government Departments. In the last few years of road and rail transport it has made the biggest mess that any Department could make. It has failed to solve most of the problems which have confronted it. The road accident rate rises every year, and to travel on a suburban train is just about the most intolerable this this side of hell. The Ministry has not even managed to solve the question whether the hard shoulders of the new motorway can be made hard.
The Ministry of Transport has a rather sorry record. I have watched its progress over the last few years, and I would point out that there has been a steady deterioration in its standard since the late Sir Cyril Hurcomb ceased to be its Permanent Secretary. The fact that it has been such a collossal failure in road and rail transport matters gives me no confidence that it will be any better able to handle the problems of the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industry.
I would ask the Minister whether he has not enough on his plate already. He has plenty to do if he wants to satisfy the travelling public, who are getting more and more exasperated at the delays and bungling of the Ministry in road transport matters. I understood that he is a very over-worked man. Indeed, from Press reports we were led to believe that one reason why the Ministry of Civil Aviation was transferred out of his care and made a separate Ministry was that he did not have sufficient time to attend properly to all the problems of road and rail, aviation, and shipping. We have set up a separate Ministry for aviation, and we were very ready to agree to this because, in the Ministry of Transport, the civil aviation aspect of the work used to receive only a margin of the Minister's time, and it was not right that a great industry of that sort should be dealt with in that way. I do not expect the Minister to admit it, but that was a common criticism in aviation circles, as the Joint Parliamentary Secretary must know, since he has mixed in those circles.
If it was necessary to transfer civil aviation from the Ministry of Transport, since shipbuilding and ship-repairing are just as important I cannot see why the Ministry should now be made responsible for it. I warn the Minister that it will take just as much of his time to oversee the future prosperity of this industry as it would have done in the case of civil aviation. The statistics are broadly similar, since the two industries are very comparable. In 1957, the gross output of the aircraft manufacturing and repairing industry was £559 million, as compared with £413 million for shipbuilding, and ship repairing. The export value of aircraft was £69 million, and for ships it was £79 million. The number of people employed in the aircraft industry was 269,000, while the number of those working in shipbuilding and ship repairing was 231,000. The Minister has given up one big job but he is taking on another which is just as big.
I want to be satisfied—and the House and the industry will want to be satisfied—that the problems of shipbuilding and ship repairing will receive a full measure of the Minister's time, quite apart from any problems concerning M.1, suburban road traffic, road accidents, and the general decline in our shipping industry. That is why we have staged this debate. We want to get new assurances from the Minister and also to draw his attention, as the new Minister, to some of the problems that he will have to face. They are serious ones.
So far, the Admiralty has been in a particularly favourable position to look after the industry, and I would like to hear from the Minister why it is thought that he can do the job better. One reason why the Admiralty has been specially favoured is that it is a very large customer of the industry. In fact, 15 per cent. of all the new building now going on in our shipyards is for the Navy. It has also had a large though diminishing proportion of repair work. In those circumstances, when questions have arisen of getting more steel out of the steel manufacturers the Admiralty has been in a very favourable position.
I tell the Minister that his Department does not have the same reputation

or standing in this matter, and I want to know whether, now that it has come under the control of the Ministry of Transport, it will be more difficult for the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industry to receive the care which was previously given it by the Admiralty. We are very doubtful about the amount of time that the Minister will be able to devote to it. As I have said, he is an overworked Minister. He has some of the biggest problems of any Minister. We know that he has a flair for publicity. I feel sorry for him because of the way the cameras chase him around. It must be a great embarrassment to him.

Mr. R. J. Mellish: He loves it.

Mr. Callaghan: I am sure that is not so. No one likes to be photographed all the time—training at Chelsea football ground, or riding a bicycle. The photographers have even pursued him into his kitchen. He must have found that most embarrassing. I hope that he will be able to escape from the glare of publicity, because he will find that gimmicks will not help him to solve all the great problems which he has taken on.
Let us deal with some of them. First, there is unemployment. Two years ago 5,600 men were out of work in the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industries. In the summer, that number rose to 12,200. The level of unemployment in the industry is about 6·6 per cent. I am concerned about the transfer of these functions to a Minister's marginal time—unless he is ready to tell us that this will become the first priority in his Ministry. In the two comparatively small docks in my constituency 500 men are out of work. Some of them have been out of work for months, and it looks as though they will go on being out of work. I want to know what time the Minister will be able to devote to this problem before I agree to this function being transferred from the Admiralty—which now does not have an excessive amount of work—to an over-worked Ministry like the Ministry of Transport.
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has yet had time to examine the future position of the shipyards. There are at least two which will have


no keels to lay after next March. Two or three of the smaller shipyards have no keels laid at present. The crisis is coming not in the large yards but in the smaller ones. How will the right hon. Gentleman overcome this? We would like to hear something from him on this subject before we agree that his Ministry is the right one to handle the problem.
Let us consider the order books of some of the shipbuilding and ship-repairing firms, as they are made public. If we examine them we see that there is a great unevenness in them. I have seen some which show that no keels are to be laid in 1960, two keels are to be laid in 1961, three in 1962 and four in 1963. It is astonishing that this great unevenness can exist. The Minister will find that many yards will have no ships to lay down during the next twelve months but will have ships coming along in two years' time. He must discover why. Are credit facilities standing in the way of the shipbuilders? Are they preventing ship owners placing firm orders for next year? If that be so, there may well be a case here for the Government to consider whether they should give them the credit facilities that are available.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Major Sir William Anstruther-Gray): Order. The House is following the speech of the hon. Gentleman with interest, but he must keep to the question of the transfer of functions from one Ministry to another and not refer to the general question of credit facilities for shipbuilding as a whole.

Mr. Callaghan: As I understand it, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, all the functions in relation to this are being transferred to the Ministry of Transport. I take it that is so. All the functions which the Admiralty exercised regarding shipbuilding and ship repairing are being transferred. If that is not so, we should know. I should be grateful to hear it. I will gladly give way to the Minister because I want to get in order. Can the Minister tell us, in order to help us, whether all the functions are being transferred?

The Minister of Transport (Mr. Ernest Marples): Under this Order it is very limited. It is in relation to Regulation 55 of the Defence (General) Regulations,

1939. It may be that other things are transferred, but this Order deals with that specific point.

Mr. Callaghan: It is not good enough for the Minister to say that it may be that other functions are being transferred. What is the position? Are all the functions being transferred or do some remain with the Admiralty?

Mr. Marples: This Order does not deal with the wider transfers which the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. The Ruling is yours, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and not mine, but this Order is limited in scope.

Dr. J. Dickson Mahon: Nonsense.

Mr. Callaghan: I quite understand that the Minister is not yet seized of the full range of his duties. Perhaps I may acquaint him with them. The circular which has been sent out from the Admiralty, or now from the Ministry of Transport—presumably under the authority of the right hon. Gentleman—to ship-repair yards says that the change of responsibility
… has involved the transfer of this Department as a whole to the Ministry of Transport. I shall continue to discharge at the Ministry of Transport similar duties to those which I have been doing at the Admiralty since 1950.
Under Vote 14 of the Navy Estimates we were quite entitled to discuss, and were in order in discussing, credit facilities for shipbuilding and ship repairing, and supply as a whole, and all these other matters. If it is to be argued that we are not able to raise these issues because they are being transferred to the Ministry of Transport, I say that that is an additional reason for leaving them with the Admiralty where we were able to discuss them.

Mr. Paul Williams: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I think that the hon. Gentleman has raised an important point. It would be for the convenience of the House to know where the lines are drawn. I understood the words above paragraph 2 of the Order to be specific. They are:
Transfer to the Minister of Transport of control of construction of ships.
I should have thought—and I wish to submit this to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker


—that this means that the debate is bound to be very narrow, however regrettable that may be—because some of us would wish it to range more widely—and must relate to the actual transfer of the powers as laid down.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The debate must be restricted to the transfer of powers between one Ministry and the other. It would not be in order to debate the original Vote.

Mr. Frederick Willey: Further to that point of order. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) was raising the question of credit. It seems to me that it is very important that we should know what is the position because earlier this year, in the last Parliament, I raised the question of credit with the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, and, in fact, that was of great advantage to a shipyard in my constituency. Surely we can now debate whether that power rests with the Minister of Transport or not? will certainly be germane to the proceedings of the House, and it will be debatable whether, as the Minister has conveyed to the House at the moment, that power is not being transferred to the Minister of Transport, because it certainly will not remain with the Admiralty.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: So far as that relates to the transfer of power from one Minister to another, it is in order to debate it.

Mr. R. J. Mellish: The Order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, refers to the
… functions with respect to the construction of ships under Regulation 55 of the Defence (General) Regulations, 1939.
It goes on to refer to the 1959 Act as well. I have taken the trouble to go to the Library to look at both the Regulation and the Act. With respect, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I can tell you that, in fact, the Defence (General) Regulations of 1939 conveyed to the Admiralty at that time complete power with regard to the control of merchant shipbuilding. There has been a certain amount repealed, but, in fact, the Admiralty had an overall say in the matter. All the powers regarding construction and repair work in the Merchant Navy vested in the Admiralty are being transferred to the

Ministry of Transport. I say, therefore with respect, that any argument about any deficiencies in shipbuilding and ship repairing, formerly the charge of the Admiralty and now that of the Ministry of Transport, is relevant as the Ministry of Transport is taking over the same functions as the Admiralty used to have.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I think not. It is only so far as one responsibility F transferred from one Department to another—

Mr. Mellish: Certainly.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: —and hon Members cannot argue the whole question of responsibility. It is the transfer of power which must be argued.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. Let us continue with the debate and see how we go.

Mr. Callaghan: I am grateful—

Mr. Hector Hughes: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. May I, with respect, make this submission? We have just heard a Ruling on the basis that it is a simple transfer of power from one Ministry to another and that no details are involved. But I submit, with respect, that paragraph 2 of this Order shows that details are involved. In my submission it is not just a simple transfer from one Ministry to another; it is the transfer of details. Paragraph 2 (1) of the Order states:
There are hereby transferred to the Minister of Transport"—
not all the functions of the Admiralty but,
… the following functions of the Admiralty, that is to say—(a) their functions with respect to the construction of ships …
and
(b) their functions under the Restriction of Construction of Ships Order …
So, in my submission, we are entitled to argue about those details and ask the Minister whether all the powers are being transferred from one Ministry to the other, or if it is only sonic of them, we are entitled to ask what are the details.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: So long as the questions relate to the transfer from one Department to another, my answer would be "Yes".

Mr. Callaghan: I am very grateful for your Ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and, of course, I shall not transgress it. It would be a great pity if the perplexities which overhang the industry at the moment were lost in a welter of Parliamentary proprieties. It is for that reason that my hon. Friends have been anxious to establish the fact, which I hope will reassure the industry, that if part of the functions are going all are going, because the functions which the Admiralty has exercised and which it is now proposed should go to the Ministry of Transport—on the whole without my consent—are very broad. The Defence Regulation said:
No person whose business or part of whose business is the repair, alteration or drydocking of ships shall carry out or cause or permit to be carried out in the United Kingdom repairs or alterations to or the drydocking of ships otherwise than to the order of any Department of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom except under the authority of a licence granted by the Admiralty.
It is from that very broad Regulation on the repair and construction of ships that the Admiralty constructed Vote 14, which, as it said, gave it power to act as the production authority for ship repairing, marine engineering, procurement of scarce materials and components. If the Admiralty was not acting under that Order some First Lord had better be impeached because he will have been acting ultra vires all these years. He had better repay the Vote, as a former Governor of Greenwich Hospital did.
I come back to the major point. It is all very well for the Minister to say that he is ready to issue licences for building and for the repair of ships, but he has to face the fact that people are not yet ready to lay them down. In the issuing of these licences, if he ever wishes to do so—the Vote has been allowed to drop—he will have to have regard to the fact that credit facilities must be made more evenly available to the shipbuilding industry than they have been up to the moment. I am certain it is right to do this. I say so for this reason. Any of us who have ship-repairing and shipbuilding yards in our constituencies know that this casual labour force can be dispersed very easily and that, as in the mining industry, once it is dispersed it is extremely difficult to gather it again. A great deal of skill is likely to be lost. I am addressing myself particularly to the

problem of the small yards, of which a number are represented by hon. Members in this House, and there are two in Cardiff. The difficulty lies there, and in those areas the Minister will be faced with great unemployment.
On the question of the capacity of small yards, there is a problem which will have to be dealt with by the Minister if the Admiralty are to hand over this work to his Department. History shows that over the last thirty or forty years, broadly speaking, ships have been getting bigger. They are wider in the beam and, generally, are of far greater tonnage than they were. The average tramp is bigger. The capacity of the small yards is not adequate to deal with the ships which owners require to be built. If this is to become a healthy industry the Minister has on his hands the problem of rationalisation and modernisation of the smaller yards to ensure its health, and the capacity of some of the small yards will have to be enlarged.
I have outlined four major problems, but there is one more. That is the fact that a number of countries which have recently become ship-owning countries are now, in the full pride of nationalism, deciding that it would be a very good thing to build their own ships. There is a growing view in some of the newly industrialised countries that they ought to subsidise and, indeed, finance the building of their own shipyards. This has happened in India and is happening in Yugoslavia, and I am sure there are other examples. What is to be our attitude to a problem of that sort?
On all the problems I have raised—the question of unemployment, phasing the programme, provision of credit, the question of what is to be our position in relation to Government-subsidised shipyards in other countries—I tell the Minister that he has a man-sized job to do and it will not do for that job to be confined to one small portion of his time. It has, or should have, taken a considerable portion of the time of the Civil Lord of the Admiralty. It certainly did ten years ago when I was there, but that is a long time ago. It ought to be a major preoccupation now.
My hon. Friends and I are not satisfied and wish to register extreme disquiet at the proposal to transfer this industry


from the umbrella of the Admiralty under which it has sheltered for some time, where it has been looked after as well as possible and where the Controller of the Navy has been constantly in touch for his own purposes with the great steel producers and other great industrialists who supply necessary materials. I feel a great deal of disquiet that this industry is being transferred to a Ministry whose record in transport over the last ten years has been nothing short of calamitous.

8.34 p.m.

Mr. R. J. Mellish: I beg to second the Motion.
We are very much indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) for the first-class case which he has made. I hope that I shall be forgiven if I begin with a constituency point, but like my hon. Friend, I have many constituents employed in shipbuilding and ship repairing. The Minister may be interested to know that the average level of unemployment there is as high as 11 per cent.
These men wrote to me recently because four frigates under the control of the Navy were to be converted to weather ships. They asked whether at least one of these ships could be converted in the London area, because it would create a lot of work for many men who had been unemployed for a long time and would be an excellent Christmas present for them. I wrote in my humble capacity to the First Lord of the Admiralty and asked whether he would be kind enough to deal with the matter. I had a reply from the First Lord saying, "This is not a matter for me. This is a matter for the Minister of Transport, who has taken over the whole of these functions and who will decide who should do this job".
At that stage I was not prepared to argue the case with the First Lord, because that would do my constituents no good. I intended to write to the Minister of Transport and have a chat with him. I do not want to complicate your job any more, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, because it is complicated enough as it is, but you will be interested to know that, in fact, the decision was not taken by the Ministry of Transport at all; it

was finally taken by the Secretary of State for Air.
That is the sort of Government that we have. Four frigates are to be converted, which is a big job involving months of work, employing thousands of men and costs thousands of pounds, and yet no Government Department is clear about whose responsibility it is. I might say that at the end of the day, although I do not know where the work has gone, the bad news which I have for my constituents is that, unfortunately, not one of these ships will come to the London area for conversion. I do not know whom I am now supposed to see about it, but I gathered from the Order that the functions are transferred to the Ministry of Transport.
In order to support what my hon. Friend has said, may I refer to the Explanatory Note to Vote 14 of the Navy Estimates to which he made some reference? This is an interesting story. The responsibility for merchant shipbuilding and repair was first assigned to the Ministry of Shipping, now the Ministry of Transport, but in January, 1940, it was taken away from that Ministry because it was realised what an inadequate crowd they are at that Ministry, and
it was transferred to the Admiralty so as to ensure the co-ordination of naval and merchant ship requirements.
This was done because it was realised that this was the right place to have a measure of control. As my hon. Friend said, this is in itself a full-time job.
The Admiralty is in any event a rundown business with not very many ships. We could almost count the number of ships which it controls on two hands, and many of them are not ocean-going.

Mr. Callaghan: There are more admirals than ships.

Mr. Mellish: Nevertheless, for some extraordinary reason this work is to be taken from the Department which has the capacity to do the job and given to the Ministry of Transport. We need more than glib explanations tonight, because the livelihood of many people is involved in this matter.
In transferring this responsibility to the Ministry of Transport we have given it to a Department which has a new Minister. I hope that you will allow me


to continue on this issue, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, although I have no doubt that I shall be out of order in a moment.
The Minister of Transport comes to this job with a great deal of glamour surrounding the way in which he will tackle it. Already people are referring to him as "Mr. Transport". Frankly, I wish him well. There are no party politics in this for me.
The fundamental problems of transport are so vast that he will find that hon. Members on this side of the House are desperately anxious to co-operate with him and to help him to solve the problems of our congested towns, cities and roads. We want him to look at the problem of the co-ordination of road and rail and a hundred and one other problems. I speak as a parent when I point out that there is also the problem of the many thousands of people who are killed each year on the roads. All this is no party matter. We must get together and help to solve these problems. The question is, "Can this mighty man solve these problems?" I am not one of those who thought the right hon. Gentleman was a wonderful success as Postmaster-General. After all, we pay more for our letters, telephones—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. The question of the Post Office certainly does not arise on this Order.

Mr. Mellish: It is relevant in this sense. The right hon. Gentleman comes into this job with a great deal of glamour. My hon. Friend—and you never ruled him out of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker—said that we have the pleasure and privilege of knowing that the right hon. Gentleman can ride a bicycle, can cook an omelette better than anyone else, and can do a number of other things. He has had an enormous amount of publicity, and I am envious of him, because we all like publicity in this House, but, if he is as strong a Minister as he and the Press would have us believe, he will say to those responsible for transferring these functions to his Department, "My Department cannot cope. It is impossible to do this sort of job", and will send it back to where it came from, the Admiralty, who surely ought to be able to do this job.
As I say, this is not a political matter. We are now discussing the livelihood of

thousands of men. We know that hundreds of our ships are laid up. We are in competition with some of the great ship-repair yards of the world. This is a serious problem for many of us who represent people who earn their living in this industry. We will not allow this Department to work as a sub-department of the Ministry of Transport, which is already overloaded with work. The problems are too great for any one man to deal with. There will be trouble if the Minister gets up and says, "It is all right; we will deal with it". We will not take that from him. We want to know how he proposes to solve the problem We want to know his long-term plans. I have a shrewd idea that until tonight he did not know that the Department had been transferred to him.

8.42 p.m.

Mr. Paul Williams: The hon. Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish) always entertains the House, whether we agree with him or not. He is always most engaging. Indeed, he was much more engaging in what he had to say and the way he said it than the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan). The speech of the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East missed the point, and it was wildly extravagant on two particular points. The first concerned his reference to the civil servants involved. He said that this Ministry had gone downhill since the retirement of a particular civil servant.

Mr. Callaghan: Hear, hear.

Mr. Williams: I am glad to hear the hon. Member saying "Hear, hear." I can only assume that he was making a most cleverly veiled and cunning but, nevertheless, unpleasant attack on the civil servants who have occupied high positions at this Ministry. If he was not doing that, I should be glad if he would say so to the House.

Mr. Callaghan: It is well-known throughout the whole of Whitehall that some Departments have a high reputation and some have not. I put it to the hon. Member quite clearly: if there is a choice between the Admiralty and the Ministry of Transport, the quality of civil servants in the Admiralty is much


higher than it is in the Ministry of Transport. I have served in both Departments. I shall not be mealy-mouthed and hide that sort of truth, which the country ought to know about when important functions like this are being transferred. I want this to go down clearly on the record. In my view, the deterioration of this Ministry started when a great civil servant, Sir Cyril Hurcomb, retired.

Mr. Williams: The hon. Member has made his own position perfectly clear, but I do not think that by that approach he will help the task of those who work permanently at the Ministry of Transport. I think that what he said earlier and what he has now repeated has done a great deal of damage to this Ministry. We on this side of the House reject what the hon. Member said.
Secondly, I was surprised to hear the general line of attack by hon. Members opposite, criticising something of which I should have thought they would approve—this form of co-ordination of our transport effort. That is a phrase which I always understood to be lauded by hon. Members opposite. Nevertheless, this appears to be a moment of reversal of faith for them. They cannot be right on both occasions; they can take their choice.
The object, I understand, is to transfer to the Ministry of Transport powers previously held by the Admiralty. I have always felt that there was something lacking in the control exercised by the Admiralty in its set-up over the problems of shipbuilding and the co-ordination of policy on shipbuilding, taxation and ship ownership. There may be, therefore, positive advantage in the transfer of power.
Ignoring the slight contretemps between the two sides of the House concerning the civil servants in the Ministry of Transport, it would be regrettable at this moment of transfer if a sincere tribute were not paid from both sides of the House to those devoted civil servants who have worked in the Admiralty to further the cause of our shipbuilding. Many of us, on both sides, know them very well and appreciate the work they have done quietly, consistently and over a long period to further our shipbuilding interests.

Mr. F. H. Hayman: Will the hon. Member now take steps to correct the charges that are always made from his side of the House against an overflowing Civil Service, many of whose servants are simply hanging on to their jobs?

Mr. Williams: The questions of size and quality are quite separate matters. I am talking of the quality of the civil servants in the Department at the Admiralty who, under the Order, are being transferred to the Ministry of Transport. I believe that they are devoted men who are entitled to great support from the country in general.
It seems to me that, under the Order powers which are being transferred from the Admiralty to the Ministry of Transport will give greater strength and co-ordinating ability to the Ministry of Transport in its oversight of land transport problems allied to sea transport problems and the co-ordination of policies in providing for the transport of goods across the seas.
Like the two hon. Members who have spoken from the other side of the House, however, I believe that in this transfer there is danger of overloading a Ministry. This is a matter on one aspect of which we need a specific statement this evening. I refer particularly to the position of the previously-named Galbraith Committee. Has the rôle of that Committee been transferred with these powers to the Ministry of Transport? Is the Ministry of Transport now responsible for the development of nuclear power for commercial enterprise? This is a most important matter, which is, perhaps, of greater long-term significance than anything else that is debated here this evening.

Dr. Dickson Mabon: The hon. Member is too late now.

Mr. Williams: It is all very well for the hon. Member to say that. This is something which I have been championing since before he came to the House.

Dr. Mabon: The hon. Member should know that ten days ago the Minister of Transport answered this question. He should, therefore, know the position.

Mr. Williams: I know what the position is. We need to have it cleared up specifically in relation to this debate tonight.
My other hesitation about the transfer is that I am not certain how the Ministry will be able to balance the interests of the shipbuilders, on the one hand, and the shipowners, on the other hand. There are many ways in which these two interests may conflict in times of emergency and difficulty. Obviously, the interest of owners is to get their ships at the cheapest price and at the earliest possible date, whereas the builders, naturally, are interested in selling at the highest possible price. There is, therefore, danger of conflict of interest in the shipping community in general between the owners, on the one side, and the builders, on the other side.
It is worth while to give notice to the Minister that there are certain large problems which he will have to face and solve in the near future. The recovery of shipbuilding in this country depends primarily on the recovery of world trade. Obviously, this is a matter far outside the Order, and therefore—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: It is indeed outside the Order. For that reason, I hope very much that the hon. Member will not continue in those terms.

Mr. Williams: I was about to add, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, the words, and therefore I will not elaborate on this point.
Nevertheless, there is something which is of equal importance which does come within the purview of this Order. There is a nationwide and a worldwide surplus of building capacity. Because of the very narrow lines of the Order, I do not think it will be possible to develop that matter, but it is a problem which will rest on the Minister's desk and will go on resting there—hon. Members will see that it does rest there—till some method is found to solve it. Many countries which have attained or developed self-government since the war are developing their own yards and wish to develop their own capacity. The hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East mentioned this. It is a problem which has consequential effects upon our yards in this country.
Then there is what is, perhaps, the greatest immediate problem on the

Minister's desk, and that is the question of the surplus tonnage which is laid up all over the world today.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. I do hope the hon. Member will try to keep to the terms of the debate. It concerns the transfer of functions from one Department to another.

Mr. Mellish: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. With respect, it seems to me that the hon. Member's argument is valid in the sense that he is arguing that with this transfer of functions the Minister will not have the time or the opportunity to deal with them because of the enormous problems he has already. That is a fair point, surely?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I have endeavoured to rule that we must try to stick to the transfer of functions from one Department to another, and that is what I invite the hon. Member to do.

Mr. Williams: I will, indeed, try to keep my speech on rather narrower lines, Mr. Deputy-Speaker—

Mr. John Rankin: No.

Mr. Williams: —than perhaps it has been so far—

Mr. Rankin: No. On a point of order. May I put this point to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker? Is the hon. Member for Sunderland, South going to be allowed to limit the scope of the debate, as he obviously will, if he succumbs to this indefinite Ruling? Because it is indefinite, if I may say so with respect, when we are concerned with a transfer of functions which so far have not been clearly defined.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The scope of the debate should be limited by the Chair and not by hon. Members.

Mr. Callaghan: This is important, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, not only for the hon. Member for Sunderland, South but for hon. Friends of mine who may wish to continue the debate. Is it not in order to argue, as I tried to argue, I hope successfully, that if the Minister has a problem on his table at present which is very large and needs solution and has not been solved, that is a good reason


for not giving him these additional functions? As I understand the argument of the hon. Member for Sunderland, South, it is that there is a great deal of tonnage laid up in ports and harbours round the world and that this is a problem the Minister has to deal with now. It has not been dealt with. I am not blaming the Minister because it has not been dealt with, but from the fact that it has not been dealt with it could be argued by the hon. Gentleman that the Minister should not have many other matters put on him as well.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I take no exception to the way the hon. Member puts it.

Mr. Williams: Neither do I, and I thank the hon. Gentleman. Nevertheless, I do not intend to elaborate it at his invitation.
The fifth matter on which the Minister has to exercise his powers, but which, if these powers are transferred, will be the key one, is this. With this transfer of powers, will he be in a position to make recommendations in time for the Budget? Because it seems to me that if these powers are to be granted he must have a policy for the taxation or otherwise of shipping and the shipbuilding industry. Unless we know that he has those powers and can exercise them properly, it would be wrong to grant him these powers today.
Finally, these functions and powers being transferred today are powers which give the Minister the privilege of serving Britain, British shipbuilding and British shipping in a greater degree than has come to the lot of anyone for a considerable period of time. I hope and pray that he will not spend all his time building bridges and new roads, but that he will think primarily now of British shipping and British shipbuilding. If he is able to give us an assurance on that this evening, I shall welcome this transfer of functions as being in the interests of the whole industry.

8.55 p.m.

Mr. James H. Hoy: I certainly do not want to occupy the time of the House by discussing the merits of respective civil servants, but I am bound to say, in reply to the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams), that I wish that he and many

of his hon. Friends showed the same solicitude for those members of the public who serve the nationalised industries, such as the National Coal Board, the electricity boards and the gas boards. I will not go beyond that, but I think that the hon. Gentleman must accept from me that the Civil Service is one part of the make-up of life in this country. Some are better than others, which was all that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) said.
The question I want to raise is purely that of employment, and I make no apology for it at all, because in my constituency, Leith, we have had continued dealings with the Admiralty and we have run into a fair amount of trouble and certainly considerable unemployment in the shipyards. I think that Leith is fairly representative of all shipyard constituencies throughout Scotland and in Britain as a whole. Indeed, the only point on which I differ from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East is that he seemed to think that there has been a wide difference in the unemployment position between the big and the small yards. The stage is rapidly being reached when unemployment is reaching the big yards as well as the small ones.
One of the things we have to contend with is competition, on which I will not expound, except to say that there are many in the shipbuilding industry who feel that our shipbuilders are unable at present to compete on equal terms with shipbuilding firms abroad, because of concealed subsidies or credit facilities which are not obtainable by shipbuilders in this country. I will not take the matter further except to say that, if the Minister of Transport is to deal with this problem, the quicker he looks into this question the better it will be for our shipbuilding industry.
What confronts us today is the ever-growing unemployment. I have had a letter only this week from the secretary of the branch of the United Society of Boilermakers, Shipbuilders and Structural Workers in my constituency. In this yard, which has given of its best throughout the years and has a great record of service, with very few hours, if any at all, lost through strike action, we have the situation that, despite all


that, the reward for that service is unemployment. It is very difficult, I say to the Minister, to ask men to go on giving of their best, and to give us the output which the country needs, if, at the end of the day, the only reward they get is to sign on at the employment exchange.
In my constituency, many rivetters have been idle for months. A considerable number have not done a day's work this year. That is serious unemployment. We have able-bodied, efficient tradesmen who are capable in every way, yet simply cannot find work. The same may be said of the shipwrights in my constituency. Unemployment is rife, and, what is worse, they think that by March of next year there will be no more keels to lay down. Therefore, the out-look gets worse.
It is often said that we ought not to have, and cannot have, direction of industry or direction of labour, but unemployment in my constituency would be very much worse if it were not for the fact that the unions concerned have been able to secure employment for people from Leith in Glasgow, at Grangemouth. I was surprised to find from this letter that a dozen men have now gone to Lowestoft to find employment. It might be said that we shall not have direction of labour, but unemployment is directing shipbuilding workers out of Scotland into England.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Member will try to direct what he is saying to the question of transfer from one Department to the other.

Mr. Hoy: Yes, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I do not want to transgress the rules of the House. All I was saying was that there are two different types of transfer, and the transfer of men from my constituency to Lowestoft is one which we think important.
When this responsibility is transferred, it will be transferred to the Ministry of Transport. I am not prepared to vote in favour of that taking place unless the Minister can give me an assurance that he will deal with this problem. It is the responsibility of the Admiralty at present and if the transfer takes place it will become the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport.
I do not want to delay hon. Members, or prevent any other hon. Member from taking part in the debate, but I say in all seriousness to the Minister that the problem which concerns us in Scotland and elsewhere cannot be got rid of by photographs, or publicity, or any of those "gimmicks". The one thing that will get rid of it is work, and hard work, and it is work that the men in my constituency want. If they meet with failure in this respect, Scotland will speak with an even much stronger voice than it did at the recent General Election.

9.2 p.m.

Mr. Stanley McMaster: I should like to add to what previous speakers have said by calling for an assurance from my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport that the transfer of these powers to him from the Admiralty will mean that he will concern himself particularly with the shipbuilding industry. We all know the reputation that the Minister has for initiative and imagination, and I trust that he will exercise those qualities in dealing with the industry. I hope that he will particularly concern himself, as a result of the transfer of these powers, with the type of shipbuilding that is going on abroad and with the prefabrication that one sees in German and Swedish shipbuilding yards, and that he will encourage the modernisation of our yards.
I hope that my right hon. Friend, in particular, will note the number of British shipbuilding orders which are today going abroad. Too many are going abroad. I would ask the Minister to assure the House that he will use all the influence in his power with the Chancellor of the Exchequer to see that the necessary capital arrangements are made by way of capital allowances, or the provision of capital in any other way so that we can modernise our yards and bring them up to the standards of German, Swedish and Japanese yards. In that way we may compete for orders and our shipbuilding industry may be assisted in facing the type of competition which it has to face today from other yards in the world.
I ask the Minister, as a result of the transfer, to concern himself particularly with our fine shipbuilding industry I hope that he will encourage it in every way possible and will do everything in


his power to improve the capacity of our yards, not only here but also in Northern Ireland. I am confident that with an assurance along those lines we can support the transfer of powers to the hands of the Minister of Transport.

9.5 p.m.

Mr. H. Hynd: I do not know whether it will be better for this work to be done by the Ministry of Transport than by the Admiralty. I shall wait with great interest to hear the Minister explain how advantageous the change will be. It seems to me that the Admiralty, which is undoubtedly running down now, will have less work to do and that the Ministry of Transport, which, we know, is full of work, will have more to do. One would think that the Lords of Admiralty would be able to carry on with their present functions in view of our smaller Navy, which is getting smaller all the time, whereas the Minister of Transport might hesitate about taking on extra work.
The staff position, it seems to me, need not be very different if it is handled properly, but, of course, it never is. The natural think to expect would be that the staff now engaged on the work at the Admiralty would move to the Ministry of Transport to do the same work. However, I pity the Minister if he tries to do that, because we all know what happens when functions are transferred from one Department to another: extra staff are taken on in the second Department, promotions are made and, at the same time, there is no saving of staff in the first Department. Somehow, that never seems to work out.
As I say, the Admiralty has fewer functions today than ever before. It is true that there are not quite so many admirals—there are still between 60 and 80—but there are big rambling buildings, not only in Whitehall but also in Horse Guards Parade, and there is also Lenin's Tomb—we all know what Lenin's Tomb is, do we not? There are also outbuildings in other places. What will happen to the offices which will be vacated by the staff which, presumably, will move? Where will the new staff go? Will new offices be taken for it?
I am confining my doubts to the one narrow point of the transfer of staff, or what should be the transfer of staff, because unless the Minister handles this

matter carefully there will not be a simple transfer of staff from one Department to another but there will be extra expenditure at the Ministry of Transport and no economies at the Admiralty. This is a non-party point and I ask the Minister to watch carefully that part of the operation.

9.8 p.m.

Sir Peter Agnew: It would be an under-statement to say that the encouragement—indeed, the facilitating—of shipbuilding and of our shipping industry generally, is one of the greatest acts the Government could perform if it had the power to do so, but the shipbuilding industry is in the hands, and rightly so, of private enterprise. Had the reverse been the case, I think it would have followed the same course of some other industries since they were nationalised.

Mr. Willey: What course has the Cunard Company followed?

Sir P. Agnew: For the most part, it steers a straight course and generally avoids shipwreck. Having made that general observation, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I am sure you will call me to order if I pursue it at any great length, as the subject of this Order, which the Opposition is seeking to annul, is very narrow in scope. I had not intended to try to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, but since the debate began—

Mr. Rankin: What made the hon. Gentleman change his mind?

Sir P. Agnew: The hon. Gentleman will hear in a minute. Since the debate began, I have been to the Library and have ascertained what the Regulations refer to. I have found out exactly what are the vast powers which the Front Opposition Bench suggested are being transferred from one great Department of State, leaving a vacuum behind, to be lodged on the broad shoulders of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport, which might make even him stoop a little. If that were the case, I should be very nervous on his behalf in spite of the progress he made while he was at the Post Office. That is not the case at all. These Regulations are Regulations which were brought in under the stress of war and are wholly restrictive and prohibitive in character. There is


nothing in them about encouraging shipbuilding. They were for the purpose of stopping the yards building merchant ships in order that they might be free at any moment to build warships for the Admiralty in furtherance of the war effort. I do not believe I have misstated the true purport of the Regulations.

Mr. Mellish: If that was so, many of our arguments would fall to the ground. But is the hon. Member aware that I received a letter from the Admiralty, after I had asked for certain work to be done in my area, stating that this was now in the hands of the Ministry of Transport which has the direction of the work to be done? How does that tie up with the powers described by the hon. Member?

Sir P. Agnew: The powers of the Admiralty are very great; indeed, they have never been entirely circumscribed by Statute. I believe that to be the case. In fact, the Letters Patent creating the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty are very widely worded and not controlled by any Act of Parliament, so far as I am aware. It would be out of order for me to mention how great are these powers. Many of them are never likely to be used again in our history, except under the stress of war, and if that calamity ever occurs I think that such powers should rightly belong not to the Commissioners of the Admiralty but to whoever is exercising the supreme power of Minister of Defence in this country.
These powers, which this Order transfers to the Minister of Transport, are merely restrictive powers that have been saved from removal when a whole host of war regulations were swept away by Her Majesty's last Government, and I understand that there is no intention by this Government to reimpose them.
The justification for the transfer of these powers from one Department to the other can be summed up in one sentence. It is simply that the actual function, if there is a function left for these Regulations to carry out, is not a military function but a civil one. It is an emergency shadow power which, in the event of an emergency occurring, would enable the Minister of Transport at once to shut down any further merchant shipbuilding and leave the

yards clear for the Defence Department of State for whatever use it might wish to put them. So it is a civil function and not a military one, and it is rightly going to be reposed in a Minister who is primarily a civil Minister.
I shall find it easy to resist the Prayer against the transfer of these functions, because I believe that the Minister of Transport in the many arduous duties which he will perform, with all the work that he has before him, will not find the extra duty imposed by this Order so great as to dislocate his work or his Ministry's work.

9.15 p.m.

Mr. John Rankin: There is nothing in what the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir P. Agnew) has just said with which we are not familiar. I am sure that it will not be a surprise to him to learn that when we debated the Navy Estimates, earlier this year, we discussed the many aspects of the Regulations to which he has referred.
My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr. Fernyhough), sitting beside me, has the note attached to the Estimates, and I am sure that he will refer to it if he is fortunate enough to catch Mr. Speaker's eye. Everything that has been said tonight from this side of the House, and, I am sure, everything that will be said from it, apart from what the hon. Gentleman may think, is justified not only by what is in that note but by the custom and precedent of the House.
Time and time again I have put to the predecessors of the right hon. Gentleman points which, I hope, I shall be able to put tonight—

Mr. Callaghan: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I call your attention to the fact, and ask you to bring it to the notice of the attendants, that an occupant of the Public Gallery is smoking?

Mr. Speaker: Attention will be called to that fact.

Mr. Rankin: The questions which have been asked and the speeches which have been made in the House dealing with these matters have been answered by the Civil Lord of the Admiralty. I


assumed that when the right hon. Gentleman took over what I thought were his functions it would automatically follow that the matters which we have brought to the attention of the Civil Lord in past years would be pertinent matters to draw to the attention of the right hon. Gentleman tonight.
I have only one worry, and it has been expressed by two or three of my hon. Friends. My constituency, Govan, has three of the largest shipbuilding yards in the United Kingdom, and they employ, I believe, between 5,000 and 6,000 men. This is an immense factor in the total employment in my constituency, because if trouble comes to those shipbuilding yards poverty will ensue almost automatically for the great mass of the people there. This affects not only the immediate Clydeside area; because of Scotland's dependence on ancillary industries related to shipbuilding, it will also affect the whole of the country.
I want to impress on the right hon. Gentleman the fact that we regard shipbuilding and ship repairing as a major Ministerial task, and I hope that he will find it possible to do what would appear to be two major Ministerial jobs. To ally shipbuilding and ship repairing with transport is to place too big a burden ort one Minister, however able that Minister may be. I would have felt more satisfied if we had been told that this was not merely a transfer of functions, but a transfer of the responsibility for shipbuilding and ship repairing to a separate Minister. I say that because there are great problems to be faced, some of which have not yet been mentioned.
We have been talking about redundancy. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Hoy) referred to—

Mr. Speaker: I am reluctant to interrupt the hon. Member, but he must relate what he says, if he can, to the particular functions transferred by this Order.

Mr. Rankin: I was merely about to quote something already said and, it already having been said, I assumed that it must have been in order and, therefore, being in order from that point of view, I thought that I could refer to it, Sir.

Mr. Speaker: I do not know what it was, but, supposing what was said was out of order, it will not be cured by the hon. Member referring to it.

Mr. Rankin: I was trying to say that it was said, so I assumed that it must have been in order, because I am certain that an occupant of the Chair would not allow anything out of order to pass his notice.
I only wanted to point out that this was not merely a local, but a national problem, and was emphasised by the fact that this industry's labour force over the past year has fallen from 210,000 to 190,000. That is the great problem, anti in taking over these functions—

Mr. Speaker: I dislike having to interrupt the hon. Member, but unless the debate is kept in order it wanders from one subject to another. It is not to be doubted for a moment that it is a great problem, but can the hon. Member relate it to the transfer of functions effected by this Order?

Mr. Rankin: Like you, Mr. Speaker, I do not like being interrupted. I was doing my best to get it over quickly, because of its importance and because I believe that the Minister, if he does not appreciate it now, will realise in due course that this aspect of shipbuilding is a very important function for him.
I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman a question which derives from one which I have already put on the Order Paper. Having had that Question answered by the Minister, in a Written Answer, unfortunately, I take it that it will be in order.

Mr. Speaker: It will be in order if it is in order in this debate, but the hon. Member may have asked and had answered many questions which would not be in order in this debate.

Mr. Rankin: This matter has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) and others. We have drawn the Minister's attention to the fact that world capacity to build ships is now three times greater than world demand. In view of that, what consultations has the right hon. Gentleman had, or does he propose to have, with those people interested in the shipbuilding industry, the shipping industry and the trade


unions which might be affected by any of his decisions? Because of the new duties that have come to him and the tremendous increase in world capacity for building ships, has the right hon. Gentleman devised any policy, or is he thinking of any policy, which will help to maintain full employment in the shipbuilding yards?
I want to advance another suggestion which has been freely canvassed. The Government ought to encourage the policy of scrapping ships which are over a certain age. Many of our ships are now out of date. The Government should embark on a policy of replacing those ships by more modern vessels. Such a policy would require credit facilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East has already made that point from a different angle.

Mr. Speaker: There is great difficulty about the course that the hon. Gentleman is seeking to navigate. I do not think that he has in mind how limited are the functions under the Statute by which they are governed. They are related to
… such prohibitions or restrictions as appear to the competent authority to be expedient having regard to any agreement or arrangement concluded in respect of defence matters, or any consultations held in respect of such matters, between Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and the government of any country outside the United Kingdom.
My difficulty is to relate what the hon. Member is saying to that.

Mr. Rankin: I hope that it will be realised that nothing I have said so far has not been put to the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor. I agree that we are dealing with what would, on the surface, appear to be a limited and narrow subject, the transfer of functions. We on this side of the House have endeavoured to navigate the debate in such a way—with, I hope, the co-operation of Mr. Speaker—that the Minister will be able to tell us what is the policy that he is churning over in his mind to deal with the issues and responsibilities which have been placed on his shoulders.
I do not want to say any more. If the Minister can say something helpful on the points that I have raised it will bring great comfort to shipbuilding areas

which are facing a serious future. It is because of that that I have persisted in trying to put over the points that I have raised.

9.29 p.m.

Mr. E. Fernyhough: The hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) paid tribute to the Admiralty and to the men who deal with the administration of this problem there. If those men have done such a good job, why does the hon. Member welcome the taking away of the functions that have been performed by that administration and the placing of them under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transport? I should have thought that if these men, who had been connected with merchant shipbuilding and ship repairing for so long and knew so much about it, had done such a wonderful job this was not the time to take their powers from them and transfer them to the Ministry of Transport.
Some of us are very concerned about the transfer. We are concerned, first, because it may not be possible to ask as many Questions and to raise the problem of shipbuilding and repairing in as many debates when the functions have been transferred to the Ministry of Transport as it was when the subject was under the administration and jurisdiction of the Admiralty. That would be very unfortunate, because the right hon. Gentleman is taking over at a time when the industry's future prospects appear rather bleak.
I am opposed to the transfer because hundreds of men in my constituency do not know where their next week's work will come from. Last year about 8,700 men were employed in ship repairing in the Tyne and Blyth area, but that figure has now fallen to just over 5,400. The number of unemployed ship repairers has risen by 2,000, and when I go back to see my constituents this week-end they will ask me whether, before I gave my vote for the transfer of these powers, I was assured that the new Minister would look after their interests as well as, if not better than, the Admiralty.
The right hon. Gentleman must realise that a great deal of apprehension exists on this point. Many people feel that this may be a case of the Government thinking that they must write the industry off, and can therefore pass it to the control


of a Minister who is overworked and has to deal with many other problems already and will therefore have no time to care for this major industry. They feel that the industry may be allowed to wither away. Unless the Minister is asking for powers to do something during the next two or three years far more deliberately and effectively than did the last Minister, there will be no purpose in making the transfer.
What attitude does the Minister take in regard to the restrictions on foreign orders? Will the Ministry now remove those restrictions and enable anybody abroad to have a ship built in Britain? We are entitled to know.

Mr. Speaker: I am not sure that I understand in what respect the hon. Member is entitled to know that in the context of the functions which are to be transferred which relate to the licensing or construction of shipbuilding in this country.

Mr. A. C. Manuel: On a point of order. As I understand it, this Statutory Instrument deals with the transfer of powers concerning the construction of ships from the Admiralty to the Ministry of Transport. We know that the great majority of shipbuilding yards tender for Admiralty orders. If foreign competitors are allowed to take up berths in the shipyards, and keels cannot be laid down if the Minister wants them, cannot that matter be brought into the scope of this discussion? Cannot we he sure that there will be an unopposed building of those Admiralty ships which the Minister may desire to order from any yard?

Mr. Speaker: If the hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr. Fernyhough) can relate what he says to the functions being transferred by the Order, well and good, but I do not know how he relates what he was saying to that matter.

Mr. Fernyhough: The point I was making is that at the moment there are certain embargoes regarding the building of ships for certain countries. That has been the direct responsibility of the Admiralty. I presume that the responsibility will now be taken over by the Ministry of Transport. I want an assurance that the practice which has obtained in the past will not continue in the future. In other words, if the

Russians, the Rumanians or the Poles want ships built in this country, the Ministry of Transport, as the responsible Ministry, will not stand in the way.
The second thing I wish to know is whether the Minister will pursue some sensible arrangement in the international sphere so that British shipping may be given a fair chance. Unless that is done the industry cannot possibly prosper. So it is the job of the right hon. Gentleman to see that some of the unfair practices and discriminations which now make it impossible for our people to compete on fair terms—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I regret having to interrupt the hon. Member, but he cannot conceivably relate that proposition to this Order.

Mr. Fernyhough: I presume that the Ministry of Transport Estimates will contain an Explanatory Note identical with the note in the Navy Estimates covering shipbuilding and ship repairing. Referring to the power being retained, the Explanatory Note in Vote 14 of the Navy Estimates states:
… it has been retained in order to bring out the Admiralty's continued responsibility as the production authority for the merchant ship building, ship repairing and marine engineering industries and for maintaining contact with these industries on all matters of common concern.
I should have thought that questions of overseas orders was a matter of common concern; I should have thought that unfair discrimination and practices was a matter of common concern; I should have thought that the running down of the industry was a matter of common concern; I should have thought that unemployment in the industry was a matter of common concern—

Mr. Speaker: It may be of common concern. The trouble is that it does not relate to the functions transferred by this Order.

Mr. Fernyhough: I should have thought that since what I am saying would be perfectly in order when we are discussing the Navy Estimates, it should be in order now, but the power is being transferred to the Ministry of Transport.

Mr. Speaker: Possibly, but not by this Order.

Mr. Fernyhough: I do not wish to deny your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, but henceforth all the questions which in the past I have put to the Admiralty regarding these matters will now go to the Minister of Transport and I am merely asking what his attitude will be. The right hon. Gentleman has asked for power to administer these matters. He is asking for powers which hitherto have been possessed by the Admiralty. I am not anxious to give him these powers until I receive an assurance that he will exercise them in the way that I should wish him to.
I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to go on for so long. [Laughter.] I hope that hon. Members are not going to tempt me because I have more notes which will enable me to speak for longer. I would say this to the Minister. He, of course, may win many medals for building roads and bridges and easing our transport problems, but unless when he leaves his present office he can say that he has restored something of the security and prosperity to the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industries which they knew between 1940 and 1956, all his other achievements will pale into insignificance because he is bound to leave not only wrecked towns and wrecked shipyards but wrecked homes and wrecked men.

9.40 p.m.

Mr. John Strachey: I understand that we are debating the transferance of certain powers of supervision over the shipbuilding industry from the Admiralty to the Ministry of Transport. We are questioning the utility and advisability of that transfer.
Although, like my hon. Friend the Member for Accrington (Mr. H. Hynd), I find it particularly difficult to form an opinion on any benefit to the shipbuilding industry if such a transfer is made, I was confirmed in my scepticism about that utility by what the hon. Member for Sunderland. South (Mr. P. Williams) said. He made it plain enough, I do not think anyone could deny, that these powers are being transferred from one of the most powerful and one of the most formidable Ministries, the Admiralty. Anyone who has had any dealings with the Admiralty when in Ministerial office will know how formidable that Ministry is, but, with respect to the hon. Member,

it is being transferred to a far newer and far less formidable Ministry.
We ask how this transfer of powers will fill empty berths, particularly in the Caird Shipyard, in Dundee, which is a problem which affects me especially and, mutatis mutandis, will apply to every hon. Member who has a shipyard in his constituency. There is the simple problem about which we asked you, Mr. Speaker, and you referred, if I may say so with great respect, to your difficulties in this debate on a number of occasions; but our central difficulty is that we can see no hope, in this transfer of powers, of any benefit to what is becoming an increasingly desperate situation, in a number of constituencies throughout the country, in a great and traditional industry.
The hon. Member for Sunderland, South spoke of the shipbuilding industry and was glad that it was in the hands of private enterprise. I should have thought that that was a particularly unfortunate example. It is quite true that it is in the hands of private enterprise. I do not wish to attack the shipyard I know best, the Caledon shipyard, in my constituency, but I must say that when I moved there from other industries—some of them private and some of them public—in that constituency, I have sometimes been tempted to think that I have moved a step back in industrial development.
The abilities of the Minister of Transport received a new eulogy from the hon. Member. We were told that he had remarkable initiative and enterprise. I am bound to tell him that I think he will need the whole of it in dealing with the shipbuilding industry.

Mr. P. Williams: I am grateful to the right hon. Member for giving way. I am sure that he would not want to blackguard the whole British shipbuilding industry on one case, which I personally do not know. I think that he would acknowledge that the majority of British shipbuilding yards have put back profits into amazing plans for reorganisation, modernisation and re-equipping.

Mr. Strachey: I certainly should not want to blackguard the particular shipyard of which I spoke. As a matter of fact, I think that it is well up to the average, but, without claiming any great


technical knowledge and judging by results, and without at the moment saying that I can allocate blame, this industry does not seem, in the test of world competition, to have succeeded very well in holding its own. We ought to face that fact.

Mr. Speaker: The difficulty, which I share with the right hon. Gentleman, I suspect, is in relating his observations to this debate. The problem in which I would welcome his assistance is how they relate in any way to the functions transferred by this Order.

Mr. Strachey: I realise, Mr. Speaker, that I was led astray by the interjection of the hon. Member for Sunderland, South.
The strict issue is the transfer of these powers of supervision. Those of us who represent constituencies which have a shipbuilding interest feel great scepticism and very serious concern whether this Order will help us. It seems to me that that is the substantial issue with which the House is concerned. We should like some light on it.
At the very end of the last Parliament I called attention to the parlous situation which was developing in the Caledon Shipyard, in Dundee. I am bound to use every opportunity to call attention to it. The powers of supervision, be they great or small, which the Government possess over this matter are being transferred from one Department to another. Surely that is an occasion on which we must call attention to what may be regarded as a local emergency, but which is also a national emergency which has arisen in this industry.

9.47 p.m.

Mr. Dudley Williams: If I had any doubts before I came into the Chamber whether the transfer of these functions from the Admiralty to the Ministry of Transport was desirable, I should have been persuaded that it was desirable by the speech of the right hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey). First of all, he treated us to an explanation of the disastrous state into which a yard in his constituency has fallen. He says that it cannot meet competition from overseas. In spite of this, he says that we should continue with the same system which he maintains has

created this state of affairs and that we should not transfer the functions from the Admiralty to the jurisdiction of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport.

Mr. Strachey: I understand that the hon. Member is arguing that after ten years of Conservative holders of the office of First Lord of the Admiralty they have reduced the shipbuilding industry of this country to the present parlous state. I did not go as far as that.

Mr. Williams: The right hon. Gentleman is well known for twisting arguments. I said nothing like that. I said that the right hon. Gentleman maintained that this yard in his constituency is in a mess, and that it is in a mess under some control by the Admiralty In spite of the fact that it is in a mess he says that it must not be transferred to another Minister who may run it more efficiently.

Mr. Rankin: rose—

Mr. Williams: The hon. Gentleman has had a lot to say to the House already and has been out of order.
I think it most desirable that this transfer of functions should take place. [HON. MEMBERS: "Read the Order."] Hon. Members might be interested to know that I have read the Emergency Laws (Repeal) Act, 1959. I will read to the House the paragraph to which the Order refers. The Second Schedule states:
A competent authority may by order provide—
(a) for imposing in respect of the movement, transport, disposal or acquisition of any article situated outside the United Kingdom, or in respect of the re-export of any article from the United Kingdom, or in respect of the construction of ships, such prohibitions or restrictions as appear to the competent authority to be expedient having regard to any agreement or arrangement concluded in respect of defence matters, or any consultations held in respect of such matters, between Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and the Government of any country outside the United Kingdom;
I hope that the hon. Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon), who appeared to be puzzled, is now clear what we are talking about.

Dr. Dickson Mabon: The hon. Gentleman should be fair. The hon. Member who claimed that that very wide definition was narrow and confined was one of his hon. Friends, the hon. Baronet the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir P. Agnew), who lectured us for trying to argue the matter on too wide a basis. The hon. Gentleman ought to ask for an apology from the hon. Baronet, not from us.

Mr. Williams: My hon. Friend was perfectly right when he gave the reasons why the functions were originally exercised by the Admiralty.

Mr. Rankin: The hon. Member did not hear the speech of the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South.

Mr. Williams: I did hear my hon. Friend's speech. As my hon. Friend pointed out, the reason for these powers being under the control of the Admiralty was that in days gone by it was essential for the Admiralty to have complete control over the shipbuilding industry so that it could clear the yards, if necessary, in order to put forward an important programme of construction for war purposes. That state of affairs is never likely to arise again, because if there is a major war, which we all hope and pray will never happen, without doubt we shall not have the opportunity to carry out a large shipbuilding programme. A war would be settled in a very short time and we should have to make do with the ships that were available. That was the point made by my hon. Friend, who was criticised by an hon. Member opposite. I think that my hon. Friend was quite right.
What are the points in favour of transferring these powers from the Admiralty to the Ministry of Transport? First, both the shipbuilding and shiprepairing industries must remain as competitive as possible. That is very necessary. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) said, there are many highly efficient yards in this country, but it is essential that that efficiency should be kept as high as possible. My belief is that this is more likely to happen if control of the industry is exercised by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport than by the First Lord of the Admiralty, because I believe that the Ministry of Transport,

in particular, has greater experience in handling industrial relations, which is very important if we are to have a high level of efficiency in the shipbuilding industry.
It is no good hon. Members saying that we are losing orders abroad. We shall continue to lose orders unless we can keep down to a price and keep our yards as the highest possible efficiency. I do not think that we are likely to achieve that end if the industry generally is controlled by a Service Department.
I therefore welcome the proposal to transfer these functions to the Minister of Transport. I am satisfied that he will make a success of it, in spite of the derogatory remarks made about him tonight. There are plenty of people in this country who have a great admiration for the work which he did at the Post Office. I think that he will be even more renowned after he has served his time at the Ministry of Transport.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Johnson. I am sorry—Dr. Dickson Mabon.

9.55 p.m.

Dr. J. Dickson Mabon: Not only is it a case of mistaken identity, Mr. Speaker, but the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) thought I had previously made a speech. This is the first time I have spoken.

Mr. Dudley Williams: The hon. Member practically made a speech in the course of his intervention.

Dr. Mabon: An extremely good one, too. The hon. Member for Exeter has made an excellent contribution. He has tended to elaborate the point that we have been trying to make all along concerning the importance of this transfer of functions. Very few hon. Members opposite appear to have appreciated the extent of these functions.
The reason why my hon. Friends on this side of the House, in their natural zeal, have got into trouble with the Chair is the difficult interpretation of the many functions which follow from the Order. At least three Acts of Parliament and no fewer than four Orders are involved. One of the Orders is over 20


years old. In paragraph 2 (3) of the Order, we find the following:
Any authority, licence, or direction given or granted by the Admiralty for the purposes of the functions transferred by this Order shall, if in force at the coming into operation of this Order, continue in force as if given or granted by the Minister of Transport.
There must be in existence literally hundreds, if not thousands, of such authorities, licences or directions
given or granted by the Admiralty.
The administrative directions flowing from the Order must come to a substantial number, so much so that I doubt whether even a Philadelphian lawyer could tell us what precise function at what particular time we are discussing.
The hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) was able without question from the Chair—quite rights, in my opinion—to ask a question about nuclear propulsion. I did my hon. Friends and myself a grave injustice when I said that the hon. Member's question was ten days out of date. I was wrong. It was twenty days out of date. I asked the Question, as did one or two other hon. Members, on 4th November.
It is interesting to reflect that on that day—the Minister will remember it well—he had, perhaps, 50 or 60 Questions to answer. Although he had the whole day entirely to himself, I doubt whether more than four Questions were concerned with the major industries of shipbuilding and ship repairing. While I do not deny that those four Questions were valuably used, quite apart from one of them being, mine, they were valuably used in the sense that we elicited from the Minister an important answer about an important Committee. I wonder whether in some oblique way it does not come under one of the authorities, licences or directions
given or granted by the Admiralty
in relation to the development of nuclear-propelled ships.
I seriously wonder whether the Minister is prepared to challenge the legality or the strictness in law of any hon. Member asking a Question in that regard concerning the outcome of the venture. For example, many of the authorities for spending money in the Admiralty were secured under these powers. It could be argued that if even only £1 of Vote 14 of the Navy for the last year was voted

in respect of any one item covered by the Order, we are entitled to ask whether it is wise for this function to be transferred.
Coming from Greenock, which has many interests in the Navy, both Merchant and Royal, I have had a lot of experience of the Admiralty. I cannot say that I am pleased and delighted that the Admiralty is losing this function. Nevertheless, if it were going to a fresh Minister, even like the present incumbent of the office, who had no other responsibilities, I would be delighted. When, however, it is going to a man who carries on his shoulders such tremendous problems as the present Minister of Transport, I wonder whether ship repairing, shipbuilding, shipping and all the functions now being transferred will not become the Cinderella of the Department. There is no doubt about it that of Vesuvius and the other volcanoes on the other side of the House the Minister is the only one still erupting and that he has some energy which may produce something, but whatever his good intentions and whatever his energies, one cannot help wondering whether he will be able to do very much to help.
Another question comes to my mind in relation to the very point raised by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South. When we asked this Question on Wednesday, 4th November, regarding the outcome of the Galbraith Committee, the Minister said he was glad to say that this Committee had since lodged its Report and that now that Report was on his desk and he was giving it every consideration. We were all very pleased about that, but the curious thing is that Rear Admiral Wilson himself said something about it in a contrary sense. I am wondering whether Rear Admiral Wilson is being transferred along with these functions.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Dr. Mabon: This is relevant.

Mr. Speaker: The problem is to discover what this has to do with the narrow range of functions transferred by this Order. I do not want to interrupt the hon. Member if he can satisfy me about that, but I have a duty to the House, and at present I am not satisfied about that.

Dr. Mabon: I am very sorry about that, Mr. Speaker, but earlier in the debate—I do not remember whether you yourself were in the Chair at the time—there was a reference to civil servants who had worked on the matter. Rear Admiral Wilson was one. It was suggested, by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South, I think, and acquiesced in by the Joint Parliamentary Secretary, that certain civil servants would be transferred as a result of the Order. I wonder if one will be Rear Admiral Wilson.
Although he is a civil servant, he is a public figure, and he makes public speeches. I want to refer to one sueh speech of his, in which he involved this Minister and the presentation of the Galbraith Report. I am sorry if this appears complex and, perhaps, controversial to you personally, Mr. Speaker, but I am genuinely seeking information and making a point of genuine concern. It has relevance to these functions which are being transferred.
The point is that Rear Admiral Wilson in Glasgow the preceding Friday, which was Friday, the 30th October, made a public speech. I think I sent a clipping of the report of the speech to the Minister with a request to him. The Rear Admiral made certain statements that this Report—at least, the inference was—that this Report would not be in the Minister's hands or the Admiralty's hands for some time. Yet the Minister could get up some three or four days later and announce that the Report had been received.
Rear Admiral Wilson is actually in charge of this project, and I am trying to argue, without reflecting on the capabilities of Rear Admiral Wilson or of the Minister, that there seems to be a divorce in the relationship between him and the Department which is, perhaps, disadvantageous to the conduct of the Admiralty's interests. It may be an argument against these functions being transferred. I merely put that in, and no higher than that, for your consideration. The fact is that Rear Admiral Wilson did make this speech, the underlying assumption of which the Minister was able to contradict by saying that the Report had been received by him and was getting due consideration.
I would not expect the Minister to deny that that Report is an extremely

vital one for British shipbuilding, affecting, perhaps, one of the most important decisions he could make if this transfer were to go through. I doubt whether even a great motorway would excel in importance the question of what kind of nuclear reactor we are going to use in our ships.
It does seem to me that in discussing this problem tonight we are discussing one of the greatest industries in this country, the industry which dominates the Rivers Tyne and Clyde and many other small rivers—

Mr. Ede: And the Tees.

Dr. Mabon: I say what I have said without qualification, because on the Tyne and Clyde are produced four-fifths of British shipbuilding, and most of that is done on Clydeside, although I doubt whether Tynesiders would go with me that far.
This industry is going through one of the most difficult times in its history and requires the full attention of a Minister. We are alarmed lest this Minister, overburdened as he is, will not have the ability—though he may have the resolve, will not have the physical ability—to be able to carry out these duties. We do ask him to reassure us now that in the exercise of these functions which he is seeking from this House he will be able to give full attention to that industry, and we do ask him at the same time to delineate these powers and functions about which we are concerned in this debate, and to give us some hope that he will give as much time to shipbuilding and shipping as he does to other transport.

10.5 p.m.

Commander Anthony Courtney: In following the hon. Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon), may I say that I share his knowledge of the wide range of powers at present possessed by the Admiralty, and also his reluctance that these wide powers should, after a very long time, pass from the Lords Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Admiral. Surely the situation has slightly changed since the day, centuries ago, when these powers were first granted.
The situation in the shipbuilding industry, which has been brought particularly to our attention by the right hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey), the hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr. Fernyhough) and others, is a serious one. We are told that there is at present a world slump in the shipbuilding industry. As I and many others know, there are orders for shipbuilding which are available to those who go out and get them, and I ask the right hon. Member for Dundee, West why some of the orders from Brazil, Indonesia and other countries have been placed in Poland and Eastern Germany and in Finnish yards and are not now going to the shipyards in his constituency.
The reasons for this are far-reaching, and they are a commercial aspect of this matter which is, perhaps, no longer best served by a purely military Ministry. Therefore, with the greatest reluctance, I support the transfer of these powers, and would ask my right hon. Friend whether he will pay particular attention to the failure of the British shipbuilding industry to compete for the orders which are going in the world today, but which are passing to competitors, very largely in Eastern Europe.

10.8 p.m.

The Minister of Transport (Mr. Ernest Marples): Perhaps it might be for the convenience of the House if I reply to some of the points which have been made during this debate. I only hope that in doing so I can keep within the rules of order.
It has been a very good-humoured debate, with Members from the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industries playing a prominent part. Many harsh things have been said, particularly about me and the Post Office, especially by the hon. Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish). I received an anonymous postcard this morning, and I shall compare the writing on it with that of the hon. Member for Bermondsey, because it said:
My idea for motorways and roads: Get out of the business yourself before you have time to ruin transport as you have ruined the Post Office.
The postmark was not Bermondsey, but not very far away.
I should like to say that there are two points to make here. First of all, what does the Order do?—and, as you, Mr.

Speaker, said, it merely transfers some powers—and, secondly, what are the reasons for the transfer? There exist certain powers at the Admiralty, and these powers will not be added to, subtracted from nor diminished in any way. They remain precisely as they are, and all we are seeking to do is to pass them across to the Minister of Transport. Whether this Prayer is successful or not will make no difference; the powers will still be there.
I will deal first with the powers, in order to get the matter into perspective. It has been said that the Ministry of Transport at present has a great burden, and that at the Ministry we have many great problems. I agree. It has also been said that a great burden will be placed upon me, a task of great magnitude, by the receipt of these powers.
All I can say is that the powers are at present carried out by sixteen civil servants who will be coming across to the Ministry of Transport. The Director of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repairs, who is the leader of the sixteen, has arrived, and the others will be arriving shortly.

Mr. G. R. Mitchison: Delayed by the traffic?

Mr. Marples: As a matter of fact, it was someone in the Ministry who said that they were delayed by traffic jams in Piccadilly Circus, but I do not believe that is true.
They are coming from the Admiralty, and the reasons for the transfer are fairly simple. Before the Prime Minister made the alteration, the position in civil aviation was that the Minister of Transport had responsibility over the running of services and the Minister of Supply for the production of the aircraft. That was a division of responsibility which was not really efficient, and it was very much better, with the industry contracting a little and consolidating, as it were, for them to be placed under one Ministry. Therefore, that took an immense burden from the Ministry of Transport and gave it to the Ministry of Aviation.
The Minister of Transport is responsible for running shipping, and the Admiralty was doing the licensing for shipbuilding and ship repairing. The extent of the Admiralty's duties which are now being transferred can be judged by the


number of civil servants there. This Order transfers responsibility for licensing the construction of ships. No ship may be built in a United Kingdom shipyard unless its builder holds or obtains from the Government a licence for the purpose. The Restriction of the Construction of Ships Order sought to bring under central control during the Second World War the country's shipbuilding resources, both naval and civil. The licensing requirement has been kept in being probably because it is the most effective method of ensuring that the United Kingdom will meet the obligation it has accepted with other European countries to embargo the construction of certain kinds of ships for countries of the Sino-Soviet bloc.
Licences have been issued promptly, and the only delays have been where orders were for that bloc. In 1958, the restrictions on sales of ships to that bloc were drastically reduced, and there has been hardly any interference with possible trade and no builder in this country has any order at present for a ship for that bloc. The need for shipbuilding work was emphasised by the United Kingdom when the President of the Board of Trade went on a visit to Russia in the spring of this year. The Russians displayed no interest. Several United Kingdom yards have been pursuing possibilities for some time without any success.
I do not know how far I shall be in order, but I should like to say that I very well realise that this industry is in a difficult position and that shipping, shipbuilding and ship repairing are in the doldrums for reasons of world trade, and their problems are immense. I was asked by the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) whether I had seen the people concerned. I have already seen all the people connected with the old functions of shipping at the Ministry of Transport, and I hope to see in the course of the next few days all those representing the shipbuilders' interests and the ship-repairing interests.
It would be folly for me to try to answer any of these questions until I have consulted the people in the trade, talked to them and found out their points of view. For me, after twenty-odd days at the Ministry and when this Order has been in force only since 3rd

November, and with only one of the civil servants arrived, to try to answer all the questions that the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East asked me would look foolish indeed, and I do not believe that anybody here would believe me if I gave the answers.

Mr. P. Williams: Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that, in the round of conversations he has with different interests, these will include the interests of the trade unions themselves?

Mr. Marples: Yes, I will. I have seen the Shipbuilding Advisory Committee, at a meeting held for the first time at the Ministry of Transport. The chairman is Sir Graham Cunningham. The trade union representatives were present at that meeting. I arranged to look at some yards, and they asked if I would let them know when I wanted one of them to accompany me. That should show that I am carrying out my obligations to the shipbuilding interests.

Mr. Hayman: When the Minister is consulting the ship-repairing interests, will he take into account the 1,000 men who are now unemployed at Falmouth in the ship-repairing industry?

Mr. Marples: I am conscious that there is unemployment in that area, but I must take into account not only unemployment at Falmouth but consider all areas of unemployment.

Mr. Mellish: On that basis, why not take over the Ministry of Labour as well?

Mr. Marples: Because the hon. Gentleman says that I have enough to do. I might also tell the hon. Gentleman that the reason why he was referred to the Air Ministry about the ocean weather ships was because that Ministry is the customer and is paying for the ships so this rests with them. So the hon. Gentleman should go to the Air Ministry. I am glad that his education in this respect has now been completed.
I thought that the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East was a little less than his usual fair self when he said that the Ministry of Transport had been a bad Ministry this last ten years.

Mr. Callaghan: I said "deteriorating".

Mr. Marples: That would be from 1949 to 1959, and the Ministry had the benefit of the hon. Gentleman's services from 1947 to 1950 as its Parliamentary Secretary. I am sorry that the Ministry was deteriorating during that time.

Mr. Callaghan: I will give the hon. Gentleman three months if he will accept the last ten years.

Mr. Marples: We know where the deterioration started.
However, I am glad that the hon. Gentleman drew my attention to some points. I agree with him on two of them. One is the rationalisation and the modernisation of our yards. We have no hope of competing with the rest of the world in this industry unless we have the tools which will build ships efficiently and quickly. That is one of the major points to which we shall have to direct attention. The other, which is more difficult to solve, is the problem of discrimination and nationalism, when people want their own ships and go to immense lengths, such as under-cutting, subsidies and discriminating against ships of other countries. However, I would be out of order in discussing that, Mr. Speaker, and I must not get too far out of order.
This Order is narrow. Of course, the shipbuilding and ship-repairing problems are enormous, but I give this pledge to the hon. Gentleman the Member for Cardiff, South-East. I promise him that I know something personally about shipyards. When I was engaged in civil engineering I built some of the biggest dry docks in this country, and I used the labour normally used for building ships. Some of the carpenters made the shuttering and so on. So I have first-hand knowledge of the problems of the industry from practical experience and the dry docks I have built have ranged from 10,000 tons to 80,000 tons, so it was not small work.
If I find that I cannot get on with the work, I shall go to the Prime Minister straight away and say that it is too much and that he should make some rearrangement. I cannot do more at this stage. I cannot answer those questions, because it would be folly to try. I shall do my best, and if I cannot succeed I shall be frank, because it will be nothing to be ashamed of if I find that the job

is too big a burden. I am not taking it on for the sake of empire building or because of Parkinson's law. I shall do my best in the three departments—road, rail and shipping—and if I find it is too much I shall go at once without hesitation—[An HON. MEMBER: "Why?"] I have tried to explain that shipping, shipbuilding and ship repairing in any sensible concern would be brought under the same management because they are now closely related.
With all the rationalisation that is going on, the owners and operators of the ships should be brought into consultation with the shipbuilders and ship repairers in the same way as operators of aircraft should be brought into consultation with the constructors of aircraft. It is what any sensible private concern would do, and I see nothing wrong with it.
With these words, I hope the House will agree to my taking over these functions and the 16 civil servants who go with them.

10.19 p.m.

Mr. Frederick Willey: The Minister always endears himself to the House. He is the bright boy in dull company, but he has been disappointing tonight. All he has come to the House to say is, "If I do not do well, I will give up the job." But we do not know why he has the job. He said that he has been at the Ministry for only 21 days and has not yet found out, but that he will consult the industry.
These functions should not have been transferred without the industry being consulted. It is too late now. Why has not the industry been consulted before? Why treat the industry in such a light-hearted way? It is no use the right hon. Gentleman saying, "I am a good fellow. I will have a go". We want to know why this decision was taken by the Government, and on whose advice.
I have a few points to make about the actual transfer. This is not co-ordination, because aviation has been taken away from the right hon. Gentleman. He says that it has been taken away because the Ministry of Supply has been destroyed. The Minister of Aviation is in the Cabinet. Aviation has its own voice in the Cabinet. That is the position which aviation has got into because it


is in difficulties. Shipbuilding is in as great a difficulty as aviation and the right hon. Gentleman flippantly comes to the House and says, "I have only 16 civil servants".
Let us consider these two great industries. They are equally important. The difficulties facing aviation are very much the same as the difficulties facing shipbuilding. They are in neither a greater nor a lesser scale, in the case of one industry, if they are to be co-ordinated, because shipping is directly affected by the development of civil aviation.
When the right hon. Gentleman tells us about the virtue of co-ordination, I say that no one is more upset with him in this country than the shipping industry. The ship builders have no wish to be associated with a Ministry which has already let down one major industry.

Mr. Marples: No.

Mr. Willey: Let the right hon. Gentleman read the resolution of the Chamber of Shipping. One cannot be stigmatised more than he has been by the shipping industry.
Let us consider this operation as a whole. The shipbuilding industry feels very much that it has been neglected and it will read the report of this debate with the greatest trepidation—flippant remarks about it affecting only 16 civil servants. That is the whole trouble. I say at once—I am not decrying this industry—that I wish the right hon. Gentleman's information was more up to date, and that he would go to the Wear, the Tyne and the Clyde and other shipbuilding yards and see what has been done by way of modernisation.
What we are complaining about is unfair competition. It is unfair for two reasons. One is that we did not start on the level. Other countries do not say for their shipbuilding industries, "We have only 16 civil servants." They say, "We are taking every step to maintain the level of production". Let the right hon. Gentleman go to Japan and say that all we are doing for shipbuilding is to transfer 16 civil servants from one Department to another. Japan takes every step necessary to maintain its present level of shipbuilding, and it is

facing very great difficulties. What did West Germany do? Let the right hon. Gentleman tell me of a shipyard abroad that meets us on level terms.
Competition has become so keen that prices are unrealistic. As my hon. Friend said, the essential thing is to hold the labour force. The capacity of the yards of the world has trebled three times in a few years without the 16 civil servants showing any concern about it. With this over-capacity, of course, prices being quoted now, apart from the question of subsidy, mean that if our yards are to hold the work they will have to price themselves at a loss.
In these circumstances, we have had a most unsatisfactory debate. The right hon. Gentleman has made a most unsatisfactory start. This industry will face the gravest difficulties in the next few years. We on these benches have called the attention of the Government to this for the last two or three years, without any response. If I may make a confession, I would say that I hoped that we would get some response from the right hon. Gentleman that we have not obtained from the Admiralty. This evening he claims that things are the same as they were. I hope that my hon. Friends will protest against the attitude of the right hon. Gentleman—not only against what has been done—and that he will realise that we do not intend to be treated in this cavalier way.
We have great difficulties to contend with and are facing the most intense and unfair competition. It will not do for the Government to say that we have no more than 16 civil servants and that we are moving them from one Department to another. It will not do for some hon. Gentlemen to say that these are only shadow powers, emergency powers. The problem with which we are dealing is a serious one for the shipbuilding and ship-repairing industries. They are facing very real difficulties and I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends will divide on the Prayer.

Question put:—

The House divided: Ayes 113, Noes 187.

Division No. 5.]
AYES
10.26 p.m.


Abse, Leo
Hannan, William
Probert, Arthur


Ainsley, William
Hart, Mrs. Judith
Proctor, W. T.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Hayman, F. H.
Pursey, Cmdr. Harry


Bacon, Miss Alice
Herbison, Miss Margaret
Rankin, John


Baxter, William (Stirlingshire, W.)
Hilton, A. V.
Redhead, E. C.


Beaney, Alan
Holman, Percy
Reynolds, G. W.


Benn, Hn. A.Wedgwood(Brist'l, S. E.)
Hoy, James H.
Rhodes, H.


Blackburn, F.
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Ross, William


Blyton, William
Hunter, A. E.
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)


Boardman, H.
Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Small, William


Bowden, Herbert W. (Leics, S.W.)
Hynd, John (Attercliffe)
Spriggs, Leslie


Braddock, Mrs. E. M.
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Steele, Thomas


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Callaghan, James
Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Stones, William


Carmichael, James
Lawson, George
Strachey, Rt. Hon. John


Cliffe, Michael
Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Summerskill, Dr. Rt. Hon. Edith


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson
Sylvester, George


Crosland, Anthony
MacColl, James
Symonds, J. B.


Cullen, Mrs. Alice
McInnes, James
Taylor, John (West Lothian)


Darling, George
McKay, John (Wallsend)
Thomson, G. M. (Dundee, E.)


Davies, Harold (Leek)
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Thornton, Ernest


Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Manuel, A. C.
Timmons, John


Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Mapp, Charles
Wainwright, Edwin


Deer, George
Marsh, Richard
Wheeldon, W. E.


Dempsey, James
Mason, Roy
White, Mrs. Eirene


Ede, Rt. Hon. Chuter
Mellish, R. J.
Whitlook, William


Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Mendelson, J. J.
Wilkins, W. A.


Evans, Albert
Millan, Bruce
Willey, Frederick


Fernyhough, E.
Mitchison, G. R.
Williams, Rev. LI. (Abertillery)


Fitch, Alan
Moody, A. S.
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Foot, Dingle
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)
Willis, E. G. (Edinburgh, E.)


Forman, J. C.
Oram, A. E.
Winterbottom, R. E.


Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)
Owen, Will
Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.


Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. Hugh
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Woof, Robert


Ginsburg, David
Parker, John (Dagenham)
Yates, Victor (Ladywood)


Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.
Pavitt, Laurence



Gourlay, Harry
Plummer, Sir Leslie
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Grey, Charles
Prentice, R. E.
Mr. Mahon and Mr. Howell.


Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)





NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Coulson, J. M.
Hiley, Joseph


Allason, James
Courtney, Cdr. Anthony
Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)


Alport, C. J. M.
Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Hobson, John


Arbuthnot, John
Critchley, Julian
Hocking, Philip N.


Atkins, Humphrey
Crothwalte-Eyre, Col. O. E.
Holland, Philip


Balniel, Lord
Cunningham, Knox
Holland-Martin Christopher


Barber, Anthony
Deedes, W. F.
Hollingworth, John


Barlow, Sir John
Drayson, G. B.
Holt, Arthur


Barter, John
du Cann, Edward
Hornby, R. P.


Batsford, Brian
Duncan, Sir James
Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hon. Patricia


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Duthie, Sir William
Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)


Bennett, Dr. Reginald (Gos &amp; Fhm)
Eden, John
Hughes-Young, Michael


Berkeley, Humphry
Emery, Peter
Iremonger, T. L.


Bidgood, John C.
Erroll, F. J.
Jackson, John


Biggs Davison, John
Farr, John
James, David


Bingham, R. M.
Finlay, Graeme
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Fisher, Nigel
Jennings, J. C.


Bossom, Clive
Fletcher-Cooke, Charles
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)


Bourne-Arton, A.
Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)
Johnson Smith, G.(Holb. &amp; S.P'ncr's, S.)


Box, Donald
Gammans, Lady
Joseph, Sir Keith


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. John
Gibson-Watt, David
Kaberry, Donald


Brewis, John
Glyn, Dr. Alan (Clapham)
Kerans, Cdr. J. S.


Browne, Percy (Torrington)
Glyn, Col. Richard H. (Dorset, N.)
Kershaw, Anthony


Bryan, Paul
Goodhew, Victor
Kirk, Peter


Burden, F. A.
Gower, Raymond
Legge-Bourke, Maj. H.


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Grant-Ferris, Wg Cdr. R. (Nantwich)
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)


Campbell, Gordon (Moray &amp; Nairn)
Green, Alan
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)


Carr, Compton (Barons Court)
Gurden, Harold
Lilley, F. J. P.


Carr, Robert (Mitcham)
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Linstead, Sir Hugh


Channon H. P. G.
Hamilton, Michael (Wellingborough)
Litchfield, Capt. John


Chataway, Christopher
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Longbottom, Charles


Chichester-Clark, R.
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Longden, Gilbert


Clark, Henry (Antrim, N.)
Harrison, Brian (Maldon)
Loveys, Walter H.


Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Low, Rt. Hon. Sir Toby


Cleaver, Leonard
Harvey John (Walthamstow, E.)
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh


Collard, Richard
Hay, John
MacArthur, Ian


Cooper, A. E.
Henderson-Stewart, Sir James
Maclay, Rt. Hon. John


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Hendry, A. Forbes
McMaster, Stanley


Cordle, John
Hicks Beach, Maj. W.
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)







Maddan, Martin
Prior-Palmer, Brig. Sir Otho
van Straubenzee, W. R.


Maitland, Cdr. J. W.
Proudfoot, Wilfred
Vane, W. M. F.


Marten, Neil
Ramsden, James
Vickers, Miss Joan


Matthews, Gordon (Meriden)
Rawlinson, Peter
Vosper, Rt. Hon. Dennis


Maudling, Rt. Hon. Reginald
Redmayne, Rt. Hon. Martin
Wade, Donald


Mawby, Ray
Rees, Hugh
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)


Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Ridsdale, Julian
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)


Milligan, Rt Hon. W. R.
Royle, Anthony (Richmond, Surrey)
Wall, Patrick


Mills, Stratton
Russell, Ronald
Webster, David


Molson, Rt. Hon. Hugh
Scott-Hopkins, James
Wells, John (Maidstone)


Montgomery, Fergus
Seymour, Leslie
Whitelaw, William


Morgan, William
Shepherd, William
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Neave, Airey
Skeet, T. H. H.
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Nicholls, Harmar
Stodart, J. A.
Wise, Alfred


Oakshott, Sir Hendrie
Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm
Wood, Rt. Hon. Richard


Osborne, Cyril (Louth)
Tapsell, Peter
Woodhouse, C. M.


Page, Graham
Temple, John M.
Woodnutt, Mark


Pannell, Norman (Kirkdale)
Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret
Woollam, John


Pearson, Frank (Clitheroe)
Thomas, Peter (Conway)
Worsley, Marcus


Peel, John
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Pilkington, Capt. Richard
Thompson, Richard (Croydon, S.)



Pitman, I. J.
Thornton-Kemsley, Sir Colin
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Pitt, Miss Edith
Tiley, Arthur (Bradford, W.)
Mr. Brooman-White and


Powell, J. Enoch
Tilney, John (Wavertree)
Mr. Sharples.


Prior, J. M. L.
Turner, Colin

Orders of the Day — BRITISH ROAD SERVICES

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Legh.]

10.35 p.m.

Mr. Cyril Osborne: I am very grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to raise this matter tonight, and I apologise for doing so at this rather late hour. An important point is involved, and I was compelled to raise it in this way because I tried to put a Question on the Order Paper about ten days ago and the learned Clerk said that it would not be in order to ask Questions about nationalised industries in the manner that I desired. I was advised to seek your indulgence, Sir, so that I might raise the matter on the Adjournment, and that is what I am doing.
In passing, may I say that this in itself raises another important issue which one day the House will have to face? A few days ago the Leader of the House said that he thought that both sides of the House were now agreed that the nationalised industries as a whole would have to come more under Parliamentary control. I think the only way that that can be effective will be to allow more Questions. Already complaints have been made to you, Mr. Speaker, that we car not get through the Questions put down. If more Questions are going to be allowed on nationalised industries, the House will, I think, have to make up its mind to have not one hour but 1½ hours for Question Time. However, that is another issue.
I wish to raise the question of the inefficiency in certain respects of British Road Services, and I want to make it clear to my hon. Friend who is to reply that I am not now questioning the wisdom or unwisdom of nationalisation. The industry has been nationalised by the will of the nation. It is here, and we have to accept it. Our duty as a Conservative Government is to try to make nationalisation work. We are not going to alter it. It is here for good, and our job is to see that we get as much efficiency into the system as possible. I believe that one way of doing that is, from rime to time, to discuss the failings

of certain nationalised industries in the House so that they may be considered by the House, and then the Minister can go back to his controlling authority and see what can be done.
I also want to make it quite clear to my hon. Friend that I am not condemning the whole of British Road Services. In some respects, they do a fine job. In other respects, they fall down lamentably. The real question I want to put to my hon. Friend is why it is that this nationalised industry can in some respects do such a really good job and in others fall down so terribly badly. I have given my hon. Friend the evidence on which I base my questions, and lie knows the firms to which they relate, but I do not propose to give their names to the House. I feel that that is the best thing to do.
I will give three examples of where British Road Services have broken down in a most remarkable way. The first is a case of transformer parts that had been manufactured in Leicester. They were despatched on 28th October and arrived at Farnborough on 9th November. It took British Road Services 12 days to deliver the consignment a distance of about 100 miles.
One important aspect of the problem is that my friends who manufactured these transformer parts had been requested by the main contractors to get the job done quickly. The firm had asked its workmen to work over the weekend—on both Saturday and Sunday—to get the job ready for despatch on Monday morning and hoped that the consignment would reach Farnborough that day. The men were paid for their overtime. They gave up their weekend sport and leisure to do the job.
I realise that my hon. Friend is a kind of post box in this debate. I hope that he will pass on to his right hon. Friend what I am about to say. It takes the heart out of both men and management if they work like fury over the weekend to get a job ready for a bigger job and then find that the fruits of their special labours are lost because of the inefficiency of British Road Services. Those men could just as well have enjoyed their weekend leisure and finished the job on Monday or Tuesday. The consignment could then have been taken to Farnborough in normal time


and been there at least a week earlier than it arrived. It appears to the men that the fruits of their labours are wasted, and they lose heart when they are asked to do special jobs.
The second case comes from the same big firm. A group of transformer parts were despatched from Leicester on 4th November. They were handed over to British Road Services. A week later they were discovered at Surbiton and delivered to Farnborough the same day. It was only because complaints were made that they eventually arrived at their correct destination.
The third case is worse. Transformer parts were despatched from Leicester on 13th October to Chessington in Surrey. When the information was given to me by my industrial friends on 10th November, that consignment could not be found. British Road Services had lost the lot.
The important point is that those transformer parts were part of a much bigger unit which was held up because the essential parts were not delivered. I am not sure, but I think that part of the consignment was for export.
The House has been debating the vastly greater problem of shipbuilding and ship repairing, and it has been emphasised that efficiency is essential if we are to survive. It is tragic when one section of our industry makes such an effort to make itself efficient only to find that its efforts are wasted by one section of our transport system.

Mr. R. J. Mellish: I suppose that many instances of inefficiency could be quoted. Would the hon. Gentleman not be the first to admit that British Road Services have done a magnificent job for many of the industrial firms in this country?

Mr. Osborne: If the hon. Gentleman reads the OFFICIAL REPORT tomorrow, he will see that his intervention was not necessary. I said at the beginning of my speech that, in many cases, British Road Services had done a fine job.
My point is that some sections of British Road Services are working satisfactorily and efficiently but that other sections are not. It is disappointing to the men who make special efforts to get

jobs done in a certain time to see the fruits of their labours thrown away.
I assure the hon. Member for Bermondsey that I am not damning British Road Services or nationalisation. Nationalisation is here to stay. We must accept it whether we like it or not. Our job is to try to make it work efficiently. I hope that that satisfies the hon. Gentleman. I am not talking about anything that happened in the past. Nationalisation is here to stay, and it is the duty of both sides of the House to make it work. That is the problem, and I hope it is in that sense that hon. Members will allow me to make my points.
Is my hon. Friend satisfied that British Road Services, or, as a matter of fact, the whole of the Transport Commission, is getting the best type of labour it can and ought to have? I doubt it. Are these breakdowns due to an underpaid, overworked and badly organised labour force? From my own experience, I am convinced that cheap labour is seldom, almost never, efficient labour. If we pay workmen poor wages, we cannot expect the finest service from them. I wonder whether the Government ought to examine the whole of our nationalised industries to see whether the wages paid are too low, whether it would be possible to provide a better service with fewer men who were paid better wages.
I wonder whether what I have discovered about the railway service applies also to British Road Services. I should like to recount to the House what happened to me only this week. I was due to attend a meeting of the council of the Leicester Chamber of Commerce, of which I have been a member for thirty years. I had to make a report. The meeting was at two-thirty. I asked whether I could make my report first in order to catch the 3.20 p.m. train to London. I might have waited for the 4.31 p.m. one, but I dared not risk it because the trains have been so late. I was due to take part in the television programme "Panorama," and the B.B.C. wanted me at the studio at 7.30 p.m., so I had to catch an earlier train.
The train arrived at Leicester twenty minutes late. I do not complain about that so much, but it was necessary to change the engine, which took twenty minutes. I am told that in the old days it was possible to change an engine in four or five minutes.

Mr. Charles A. Howell: Never.

Mr. Osborne: That is what I am told by people who ought to know.

Mr. Howell: I worked on the railway.

Mr. Osborne: It is a case of a difference of opinion. I got my information from an old railwayman. It took twenty minutes to change the engine, and I am sure that it did not take as long as that in the old days.
There is a feeling, whether justified or not, that there is no one present with drive and efficiency to organise things, that the system runs on its own momentum. No one takes the business by the scruff of the neck and gets the most efficient service. We left Leicester at 4.54 p.m. instead of 3.20 p.m.
I asked the conductor why things were so bad. He put a point to me, and I am wondering whether it applies also to conditions in road transport. He said, "When I am 65 I shall have been working on the old Midland Railway for 51 years." He told me that since nationalisation he had been paying into a superannuation fund. He said he would receive a miserable pension of 9s. 8d. a week plus the choice of a gold watch or a clock. I say that men who have given 50 years of good service in industry ought not to be thrown out with a pension of 9s. 8d. This man said to me, "How do you expect us to put our hearts into the job if you treat us in that way?" and I have every sympathy with him.
I talked with an old man on Leicester station while the engine was being changed. He said he was 74 years old and had started work when he was 14. The pension was so miserable that the old man did not feel he dare retire. This is the point about which I want my hon. Friend to inquire. If we are to get good services from the British Transport Commission, we have to pay the men who produce these services. We cannot get good services from men who are half paid.

Mr. Wedgwood Benn: Is not this a case for the national superannuation scheme which we advocated in the General Election?

Mr. Osborne: I am not talking politics, I am trying to deal with this problem. Cannot you forget politics for a bit?

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member should not address his remarks to me.

Mr. Osborne: I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. We shall be having the next General Election four and a half years hence and the hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) can take that matter up then. In the meantime, I wish to see British industry improved to the highest pitch of efficiency, because it is on efficiency that the standard of living of our people depends.
If men feel they are not being treated properly and are not getting a square deal, surely we cannot expect the best from them. I ask, does this apply also in British Road Services, and is it the cause of the unfortunate delays which hon. Members on both sides of the House must deplore? The older servants in the transport world feel that since nationalisation a new grade has been brought in—some of them call the grade "college boys"—who have been put in over the heads of the practical men. They feel that their promotion has been blocked by those in this new grade, and the heart has been taken out of them. I do not know whether that is true; I am reporting it to my hon. Friend.
I put it to him this way, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with certain sections of British Road Services. There is no good denying that. If we are to get the best results from our transport system, we have to have these things removed, if they can be removed. I beg him to consult the authorities and see whether these questions can be looked at—not from a party political point of view or to get votes, but from an efficiency point of view. If he does that, he will do the workers, the Services and the people for whom they work, a very great service.

10.53 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. John Hay): My hon. Friend the Member for Louth (Mr. Osborne) has raised a number of points concerning both the operations of British Road Services and of the railways. I must begin what I have to say by reminding him and other


hon. Members of what I might call the constitutional position. My right hon. Friend the Minister, as the House knows, is not responsible for the day-to-day management and administration of any of the branches operated by the British Transport Commission. For these, the Commission alone is responsible. The Minister's position is simply that on these matters of day-to-day management which are raised on the Adjournment he can only give the House such information as the Commission can provide.
The subject of tonight's debate, delays on British Road Services, comes under these general rules. I must tell my hon. Friend at once—I think he appreciates this from what he said earlier—that I can give him only such general information as has been supplied by the Commission. I have, however, a little detailed information on some of the specific complaints he mentioned and of which he was good enough to give me notice. In any event, I will assure him that the attention of the Commission will be drawn to what he has said not only in respect of the allegations of delay on the part of British Road Services, but also on the rather wider and extremely helpful and interesting matters he also raised.
Turning to the general information given to us by the British Transport Commission in regard to British Road Services, speaking generally, there is little complaint about the general haulage side of the Services. I am told that, on the general haulage side, B.R.S. provides a very good and competitive service.
There is, however, a good deal of complaint from time to time, I am afraid, about one of the five companies which operate under the British Transport Commission on the haulage side—the company known as British Road Services (Parcels) Ltd. I am informed by the Commission that during September, October and November of this year this company has been having a very heavy surge of traffic. This is by no means unique. It is not unknown to all carriers of parcels traffic at this season of the year. I am informed that, as a consequence of a large amount of traffic suddenly being offered, delays may be experienced. The Commission points

out that in this respect it is in no different position from that of most other haulage firms.
This autumn pressure of traffic is an example of the dilemma which faces all road haulage organisations and, I suppose I can say, all transport organisations—the dilemma of the peak load. Every organisation dealing in transport has to be ready to provide facilities to handle peak traffic without congestion, dislocation and delay, if it can, but it can do that only by having surplus capacity which will stand idle throughout the non-peak period. That is one of the traditional problems of the transport industry.
The only solution is to try to strike a balance. This means, I am afraid, that some measure of congestion and delay has to be accepted by customers at the height of the peak. This is well known to the traveller in the London bus or by underground at the peak hours of the day.
B.R.S. (Parcels) Ltd., the company with which I think my hon. Friend is mainly concerned, is in a fairly good position to meet this situation. It is a fairly large organisation with, I am told, about 4,000 vehicles throughout the country. As a consequence, it can call spare vehicles into service from the less busy depôts to help with the peak traffic at busier depôts. The company, however, is aware of the delays and assures me that it is taking what steps it can to improve its organisation and reduce delays to a minimum.
It has given me details of its plans to reduce delays to a minimum and to improve the organisation, but I must remind the House that this firm, albeit nationalised, is engaged in a competitive business and has no monopoly of parcels services in this country. It has represented to me that it wishes to keep its plans confidential to avoid giving what might well be useful information to its private enterprise competitors. This is an attitude of mind which I am sure both my hon. Friend and I applaud—an attitude that the firm is involved in competitive business and that all its trade secrets should not be displayed before the public through the House of Commons simply because it is publicly owned. I hope that my hon. Friend will not press me further on the point. The firm has


assured me that it is doing what it can to improve the situation.
One further difficulty which I should like to mention briefly is that concerning staff. My hon. Friend mentioned this in a wider context. It is the firm's custom at the peak period to take on extra staff. We all know that the pre-Christmas rush necessitates the engagement of a lot of casual labour in many industries and businesses. The main example with which the Government are concerned is the Post Office, which takes on a good deal of casual labour at Christmas. The Post Office, which has a parcels handling organisation, has less difficulty in recruiting the extra staff at Christmas than has B.R.S. (Parcels) Ltd. for the reason that the Post Office does not have to handle packages weighing more than 15 lb., whereas B.R.S. (Parcels) Ltd. is obliged to carry parcels often weighing one cwt. or more. It is a fact that in an era of full employment B.R.S. (Parcels) Ltd. finds it extremely difficult to recruit the temporary additional staff at some of its harder-pressed depôts in competition with other industries and trades.
All these problems are exemplified in the three cases to which my hon. Friend has tonight drawn attention. I can now tell him that the despatches by his constituents coincided in a four-week period with this formidable surge of autumn traffic. That it was formidable is proved by the fact that during that period of four weeks, no less than a quarter of a million more packages were carried by B.R.S. Parcels, Ltd. than in the corresponding period in 1958. It was a heavy load which had to be taken. This meant that much greater than average pressure came upon certain of the depots, particularly one large depot just outside London, where, we believe, these three consignments from Leicester were handled.
In, I think, the last case mentioned by my hon. Friend, in which a delay of at least a month was experienced—by 10th November, my hon. Friend said, no information was available about what had happened to the parcel—I am informed today that what happened was that the parcel was lost because the label became detached. It was discovered; it has now come to light in the lost property section of the depot. This is a warning to all of us and to the public not only to label properly our packages

at this season of the year if they are sent by post or other means, but also to manufacturers of the importance of labelling. Now that the parcel has turned up, the firm has been approached to ask whether it wishes it to be sent on to the consignee.
If there are any complaints, not only in respect of the railways, but also in respect of British Road Services generally or B.R.S. (Parcels) Ltd., I hope that hon. Members will do what they can to bring to the notice of the public the statutory machinery that Parliament has set up to deal with complaints—the transport users' consultative committees. If complaints about services carried out by the Transport Commission are not, in the opinion of the complainant, satisfactorily answered by any branch of the undertaking, the individual is at perfect liberty to refer the matter to the transport users' consultative committees. They are, as the House knows, representative not of the Transport Commission alone, still less of the Ministry, but of users' interests. They are committees of consumers whose job it is to deal with complaints which cannot be, and have not been, settled by the Transport Commission. I hope that their existence will become much more widely known to the public and that they will be much more used in future.
That is all I can tell my hon. Friend because I labour under the handicap of not being able to do more than act as a kind of messenger—my hon. Friend used the term "pillar box"—for the transmission of complaints from hon. Members of this House to the Transport Commission. I will certainly see that the Commission is informed of the views of my hon. Friend and of the complaints which he has mentioned tonight. I ask the House as a whole to do what it can to promote the knowledge and use of the transport users' consultative committees, which, I have every confidence, will prove, if they are used properly, to be an extremely useful safety valve for the public.

11.3 p.m.

Mr. Wedgwood Benn: I thank the Joint Parliamentary Secretary for his contribution to the debate, which proved that there was inefficiency in private industry in its failure to label properly, as well as the unfortunate delays to which reference has


been made. I was glad also to hear the repudiation by the Minister, by implication, that the wages and conditions of British Road Services, which stand comparison with those of any comparable industry, are not responsible for the failure to recruit the right people.
When the hon. Member for Louth (Mr. Osborne) made his comment about the college graduates in a rather sneering way, he was referring to the one aspect—the premium apprenticeship scheme—in which the Transport Commission is bringing university-educated people into the service of transport.

Mr. Osborne: rose—

Mr. Benn: I shall not give way. I have only half a minute left. To try,

on the basis of the delays of which we have heard, which were due to seasonal increases in traffic, to draw conclusions about wages and conditions and the promotion and educational scheme of the Commission, was unworthy of the hon. Member, and I am sure that on reflection he will agree.
This has been a useful debate in that we could not have had it except on a nationalised industry. For my part, I have learnt one of the many lessons which I shall have to learn concerning transport from the Joint Parliamentary Secretary and from the Minister.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at five minutes past Eleven o'clock.